m way through Huck's mind, and under the
weariness they gave him he fell asleep. The widow said to herself:

"There--he's asleep, poor wreck. Tom Sawyer find it! Pity but somebody
could find Tom Sawyer! Ah, there ain't many left, now, that's got hope
enough, or strength enough, either, to go on searching."

CHAPTER XXXI

NOW to return to Tom and Becky's share in the picnic. They tripped
along the murky aisles with the rest of the company, visiting the
familiar wonders of the cave--wonders dubbed with rather
over-descriptive names, such as "The Drawing-Room," "The Cathedral,"
"Aladdin's Palace," and so on. Presently the hide-and-seek frolicking
began, and Tom and Becky engaged in it with zeal until the exertion
began to grow a trifle wearisome; then they wandered down a sinuous
avenue holding their candles aloft and reading the tangled web-work of
names, dates, post-office addresses, and mottoes with which the rocky
walls had been frescoed (in candle-smoke). Still drifting along and
talking, they scarcely noticed that they were now in a part of the cave
whose walls were not frescoed. They smoked their own names under an
overhanging shelf and moved on. Presently they came to a place where a
little stream of water, trickling over a ledge and carrying a limestone
sediment with it, had, in the slow-dragging ages, formed a laced and
ruffled Niagara in gleaming and imperishable stone. Tom squeezed his
small body behind it in order to illuminate it for Becky's
gratification. He found that it curtained a sort of steep natural
stairway which was enclosed between narrow walls, and at once the
ambition to be a discoverer seized him. Becky responded to his call,
and they made a smoke-mark for future guidance, and started upon their
quest. They wound this way and that, far down into the secret depths of
the cave, made another mark, and branched off in search of novelties to
tell the upper world about. In one place they found a spacious cavern,
from whose ceiling depended a multitude of shining stalactites of the
length and circumference of a man's leg; they walked all about it,
wondering and admiring, and presently left it by one of the numerous
passages that opened into it. This shortly brought them to a bewitching
spring, whose basin was incrusted with a frostwork of glittering
crystals; it was in the midst of a cavern whose walls were supported by
many fantastic pillars which had been formed by the joining of great
stalacti