
                                   Mark Twain

                         Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

                                     Notice

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.
 
                             BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
                                                   PER G. G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE.
 

                                  Explanatory

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect;
the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary
Pike-County dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have
not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guess-work; but pains-takingly, and
with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these
several forms of speech.
    I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would
suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.
                                                                     THE AUTHOR.
 

                                   Chapter I

You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of »The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer,« but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr.
Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched,
but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied,
one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary.
Aunt Polly - Tom's Aunt Polly, she is - and Mary, and the Widow Douglas, is all
told about in that book - which is mostly a true book; with some stretchers, as
I said before.
    Now the way that the book winds up, is this: Tom and me found the money that
the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich. We got six thousand dollars
apiece - all gold. It was an awful sight of money when it was piled up. Well,
Judge Thatcher, he took it and put it out at interest, and it fetched us a
dollar a day apiece, all the year round - more than a body could tell what to do
with. The Widow Douglas, she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize
me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal
regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn't stand
it no longer, I lit out. I got into my old rags, and my sugar-hogshead again,
and was free and satisfied. But Tom Sawyer, he hunted me
