"Oh, it ain't that kind of duty. The kind I mean is a tax. Whenever you
strike a frontier--that's the border of a country, you know--you find a
custom-house there, and the gov'ment officers comes and rummages among
your things and charges a big tax, which they call a duty because it's
their duty to bust you if they can, and if you don't pay the duty they'll
hog your sand. They call it confiscating, but that don't deceive nobody,
it's just hogging, and that's all it is. Now if we try to carry this sand
home the way we're pointed now, we got to climb fences till we git
tired--just frontier after frontier--Egypt, Arabia, Hindostan, and so
on, and they'll all whack on a duty, and so you see, easy enough, we
CAN'T go THAT road."

"Why, Tom," I says, "we can sail right over their old frontiers; how are
THEY going to stop us?"

He looked sorrowful at me, and says, very grave:

"Huck Finn, do you think that would be honest?"

I hate them kind of interruptions. I never said nothing, and he went on:

"Well, we're shut off the other way, too. If we go back the way we've
come, there's the New York custom-house, and that is worse than all of
them others put together, on account of the kind of cargo we've got."

"Why?"

"Well, they can't raise Sahara sand in America, of course, and when they
can't raise a thing there, the duty is fourteen hundred thousand per