MINERVA

ted to see the camels and elephants, so I was on hand next day, Saturday, in the ambuscade; and when we got the word we rushed out of the woods and down the hill. But there warn’t no Spaniards and A-rabs, and there warn’t no camels nor no elephants. It warn’t anything but a Sunday-school picnic, and only a primer-class at that. We busted it up, and chased the children up the hollow; but we never got anything but some doughnuts and jam, though Ben Rogers got a rag doll, and Jo Harper got a hymn-book and a tract; and then the teacher charged in, and made us drop everything and cut. I didn’t see no di’monds, and I told Tom Sawyer so. He said there was loads of them there, anyway; and he said there was A-rabs there, too, and elephants and things. I said, why couldn’t we see them, then? He said if I warn’t so ignorant, but had read a book called Don Quixote, I would know without asking. He said it was all done by enchantment. He said there was hundreds of soldiers there, and elephants and treasure, and so on, but we had enemies which he called magicians; and they had turned the whole thing into an infant Sunday-school, just out of spite. I said, all right; then the thing for us to do was to go for the magicians. Tom Sawyer said I was a numskull. “Why,” said he, “a magician could call up a lot of genies, and they would hash you up like nothing before you could say Jack Robinson. They are as tall as a tree and as big around as a church.” “Well,” I says, “s’pose we got some genies to help _us_—can’t we lick the other crowd then?” “How you going to get them?” “I don’t know. How do _they_ get them?” “Why, they rub an old tin lamp or an iron ring, and then the genies come tearing in, with the thunder and lightning a-ripping around and the smoke a-rolling, and everything they’re told to do they up and do it. They don’t think nothing of pulling a shot-tower up by the roots, and belting a Sunday-school superintendent over the head with it—or any other man.” “Who makes them tear around so?” “Why, whoever rubs the lamp or the ring. They belong to whoever rubs the lamp or the ring, and they’ve got to do whatever he says. If he tells them to build a palace forty miles long out of di’monds, and fill it full of chewing-gum, or whatever you want, and fetch an emperor’s daughter from China for you to marry, they’ve got to do it—and they’ve got to do it before sun-up next morning, too. And more: they’ve got to waltz that palace around over the country wherever you want it, you understand.” “Well,” says I, “I think they are a pack of flat-heads for not keeping the palace themselves ’stead of fooling them away like that. And what’s more—if I was one of them I would see a man in Jericho before I would drop my business and come to him for the rubbing of an old tin lamp.” “How you talk, Huck Finn. Why, you’d _have_ to come when he rubbed it, whether you wanted to or not.” “What! and I as high as a tree and as big as a church? All right, then; I _would_ come; but I lay I’d make that man climb the highest tree there was in the country.” “Shucks, it ain’t no use to talk to you, Huck Finn. You don’t seem to know anything, somehow—perfect saphead.” I thought all this over for two or three days, and then I reckoned I would see if there was anything in it. I got an old tin lamp and an iron ring, and went out in the woods and rubbed and rubbed till I sweat like an Injun, calculating to build