22

LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI.

their admiringly patterning successors; for we used to swim out a
quarter or third of a mile and get on these rafts and have a ride.

By way of illustrating keelboat talk and manners, and that now-
departed and hardly-remembered raft-life, I will throw in, in this place,
a chapter from a book which I have been working at, by fits and
starts, during the past five or six years, and may possibly finish in
the course of five or six more. The book is a story which details
some passages in the life of an ignorant village boy, Huck Finn, son
of the town drunkard of my time out west, there. He has run away
from his persecuting father, and from a persecuting good widow who

A LUMBEE EAJBT.

wishes to make a nice, truth-telling, respectable boy of him; and
with him a slave of the widow's has also escaped. They have found
a fragment of a lumber rafb (it is high water and dead summer time),
and are- floating down the river by night, and hiding in the willows
by day,—bound for Cairo,—whence the negro will seek freedom in
the heart of the free States. But in a fog, they pass Cairo without
knowing it. By and by they begin to suspect the truth, and Huck
Knn is persuaded to end the dismal suspense by swimming down to
a huge raffc which they have1 seen in the distance ahead of them,
creeping aboard under cover of the darkness, and gathering the
needed information by eavesdropping:—