humorist always--never the grimness of the moralist or the coldness of
the philosopher. He observes all human traits, whether of moral
sophistry or ethical casuistry, with the genial sympathy of a lover of
his kind irradiated with the riant comprehension of the humorist. And
yet at times there creeps into his tone a note of sincere and manly
pathos, unmistakable, irresistible. One has only to read the beautiful,
tender tale of the blue jay in 'A Tramp Abroad' to know the beauty and
the depth of his feeling for nature and her creatures, his sense of
kinship with his brothers of the animal kingdom.

In our first joyous and headlong interest in the narrative of
'Huckleberry Finn', its rapid succession of continuously arresting
incidents, its omnipresent yet never intrusive humour, the deeper
significance of many a passage in that contemporary classic is likely to
escape notice. Sir Walter Besant, who revelled in it as one of the most
completely satisfying and delightful of books, speaks of it deliberately
as a book without a moral. Perhaps he was deceived by the foreword:
"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be
prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished;
persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." There never was
a more easy-going, care-free, unpuritanical lot than Huck and Jim, the
two farcical "hoboes," Tom Sawyer, and the rest. And yet in the light
of Mark Twain's later writings one cannot but see in that picaresque
romance, with its pleasingly loose moral atmosphere, an underlying
seriousness and conviction. Jim is a simple, harmless negro, childlike
and primitive; yet, so marvellous, so restrained is the art of the
narrator, that imperceptibly, unconsciously, one comes to feel not only
a deep interest in, but a genuine respect for, this innocent fugitive
from slavery. Mr. Booker Washington, a distinguished representative of
his race, said he could not help feeling that, in the character of Jim,