e tale fitting
into his own remembered years, as if it had grown there. Every boy has
played off sick to escape school; every boy has reflected in his heart
Tom's picture of himself being brought home dead, and gloated over the
stricken consciences of those who had blighted his young life; every
boy--of that day, at least--every normal, respectable boy, grew up
to "fear God and dread the Sunday-school," as Howells puts it in his
review.

As for the story itself, the narrative of it, it is pure delight. The
pirate camp on the island is simply boy heaven. What boy, for instance,
would not change any other glory or boon that the world holds for this:

They built a fire against the side of a great log twenty or thirty
steps within the somber depths of the forest, and then cooked some
bacon in the frying-pan for supper, and used up half of the corn
"pone" stock they had brought. It seemed glorious sport to be
feasting in that wild, free way in the virgin forest of an
unexplored and uninhabited island, far from the haunts of men, and
they said they never would return to civilization. The climbing
fire lit up their faces and threw its ruddy glare upon the pillared
tree-trunks of their forest-temple, and upon the varnished foliage
and the festooning vines.

There is a magic in it. Mark Twain, when he wrote it, felt renewed
in him all the old fascination of those days and nights with Tom
Blankenship, John Briggs, and the Bowen boys on Glasscock's Island.
Everywhere in Tom Sawyer there is a quality, entirely apart from the
humor and the narrative, which the younger reader is likely to overlook.
No one forgets the whitewashing scene, but not many of us, from our
early reading, recall this delicious bit of description which introduces
it:

The locust-trees were in bloom, and the fragrance of the blossoms
filled the air. Cardiff Hill, beyond the village and above it, was
green with vegetation, and it lay just far enough away to seem a
delectable land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting.

Tom's night visit home; the graveyard scene, with the murder of Dr.
Robinson; the adventures of Tom and Becky in the cave--these are all
marvelously invented. Literary thrill touches the ultimate in one
incident of the cave episode. Brander Matthews has written:

Nor is there any situation quite as thrilling as that awful moment
in the cave when the boy and girl are lost in the dark