mpting to the waif,
but it did not outweigh his human sympathy. Instead of giving him
up and claiming the reward, Ben kept the runaway over there in the
marshes all summer. The negro fished, and Ben carried him scraps of
other food. Then, by and by, the facts leaked out. Some wood-
choppers went on a hunt for the fugitive and chased him to what was
called Bird Slough. There, trying to cross a drift, he was drowned.

Huck's struggle in the book is between conscience and the law, on one
side, and deep human sympathy on the other. Ben Blankenship's struggle,
supposing there was one, would be between sympathy and the offered
reward. Neither conscience nor law would trouble him. It was his native
humanity that made him shelter the runaway, and it must have been strong
and genuine to make him resist the lure of the fifty-dollar prize.

There was another chapter to this incident. A few days after the
drowning of the runaway, Sam Clemens and his band made their way to the
place and were pushing the drift about, when, all at once, the negro shot
up out of the water, straight and terrible, a full half-length in the
air. He had gone down foremost and had been caught in the drift. The
boys did not stop to investigate, but flew in terror to report their
tale.

Those early days seem to have been full of gruesome things. In "The
Innocents Abroad," the author tells how he once spent a night in his
father's office and discovered there a murdered man. This was a true
incident. The man had been stabbed that afternoon and carried into the
house to die. Sam and John Briggs had been playing truant all day and
knew nothing of the matter. Sam thought the office safer than his home,
where his mother was probably sitting up for him. He climbed in by a
window and lay down on the lounge, but did not sleep. Presently he
noticed what appeared to be an unusual shape on the floor. He tried to
turn his face to the wall and forget it, but that would not do. In agony
he watched the thing until at last a square of moonlight gradually
revealed a sight that he never forgot. In the book he says:

"I went away from there. I do not say that I went in any sort of
hurry, but I simply went--that is sufficient. I went out of the
window, and I carried the sash along with me. I did not need the
sash, but it was handier to take it than to leave it, and so I took
it. I was not scared, but I was considerable agitated."

Sam was not