the comfortable house.
Huck admires Colonel Grangerford, the master of the house, and his
supposed gentility. He is a warm- hearted man, treated with great courtesy
by everyone. He own a very large estate with over a hundred slaves. The
family's children, besides Buck, are Bob, the oldest, then Tom, then
Charlotte, aged twenty-five, and Sophia, twenty, all of them beautiful.
Three sons have been killed. One day, Buck tries to shoot Harney
Shepardson, but misses. Huck asks why he wanted to kill him. Buck explains
the Grangerfords are in a feud with a neighboring clan of families, the
Shepardsons, who are as grand as they are. No one can remember how the feud
started, or name a purpose for it, but in the last year two people have
been killed, including a fourteen-year-old Grangerford. Buck declares the
Shepardson men all brave. The two families attend church together, their ri
es between their knees as the minister preaches about brotherly love. After
church one day, Sophia has Huck retrieve a bible from the pews. She is
delighted to find inside a note with the words "two-thirty." Later, Huck's
slave valet leads him deep into the swamp, telling him he wants to show him
some water-moccasins. There he finds Jim! Jim had followed Huck to the
shore the night they were wrecked, but did not dare call out for fear of
being caught. In the last few days he has repaired the raft and bought
supplies to replace what was lost. The next day Huck learns that Sophie has
run off with a Shepardson boy. In the woods, Huck finds Buck and a nineteen-
year-old Grangerford in a gun-fight with the Shepardsons. The two are later
killed. Deeply disturbed, Huck heads for Jim and the raft, and the two
shove off downstream. Huck notes, "You feel mighty free and easy and
comfortable on a raft."
Huck and Jim are lazily drifting down the river in Chapter Nineteen.
One day they come upon two men on shore eeing some trouble and begging to
be let onto the raft. Huck takes them a mile downstream to safety. One man
is about seventy, bald, with whiskers, the other, thirty. Both men's
clothes are badly tattered. The men do not know each other but are in
similar predicaments. The younger man had been selling a paste to remove
tartar from teeth that takes much of the enamel off with it. He ran out to
avoid the locals' ire. The other had run a temperance (sobriety) revival
meeting, but had to ee after word got out that he drank. The two men, both
professional scam-artists, decide to team up. The younger man declares
himself an impoverished English duke, and gets Huck and Jim to wait on him
and treat him like royalty. The old man then reveals his true identity as
the Dauphin, Louis XVI's long lost son. Huck and Jim then wait on him as
they had the "duke." Soon Huck realizes the two are liars, but to prevent
"quarrels," does not let on that he knows.
Chapters 20-22 Summary
The Duke and Dauphin ask whether Jim is a runaway, and so Huckleberry
concocts a tale of how he was orphaned, and he and Jim were forced to
travel at night since so many people stopped his boat to ask whether Jim
was a runaway. That night, the two royals take Jim and Huck's beds while
they stand watch against a storm. The next morning, the Duke gets the
Dauphin to agree to put on a performance of Shakespeare in the next town
they cross. Everyone in the town has left for a revival meeting in the
woods. The meeting is a lively afiair of several thousand people singing
and shouting.
The Dauphin gets up and declares himself a former pirate, now reformed
by the meeting, who will return to the Indian Ocean as a missionary. The
crowd joyfully takes up a collection, netting the Dauphin eighty-seven
dollars and seventy-five cents, and many kisses from pretty young women.
Meanwhile, the Duke took over the deserted print offce and got nine and a
half dollars selling advertisements in the local newspaper. The Duke also
prints up a handbill offering a reward for Jim, so that they can travel
freely by day and tell whoever asks about Jim that the slave is their
captive. The Duke and Dauphin practice the balcony scene from Romeo and
Juliet and the sword fight from Richard III on the raft in Chapter Twenty-
one.
The duke also works on his recitation of Hamlet's "To be or not to be,"
soliloquy, which he has butchered, throwing in lines from other parts of
the play, and even Macbeth. But to Huck, the Duke seems to possess a great
talent. They visit a one-horse town in Arkansas where lazy young men loiter
in the streets, arguing over chewing tobacco. The Duke posts handbills for
the performance. Huck witnesses the shooting of a rowdy drunk by a man,
Sherburn, he insulted, in front of the victim's daughter. A crowd gathers
around the dying man and then goes off to lynch Sherburn.
The mob charges through the streets in Chapter Twenty-two, sending
women and children running away crying in its wake. They go to Sherburn's
house, knock down the front fence, but back away as the man meets them on
the roof of his front porch, ri e in hand. After a chilling silence,
Sherburn delivers a haughty speech on human nature, saying the average
person, and everyone in the mob, is a coward. Southern juries don't convict
murderers because they rightly fear being shot in the back, in the dark, by
the man's family. Mobs are the most pitiful of all, since no one in them is
brave enough in his own right to commit the act without the mass behind
him. Sherburn declares no one will lynch him: it is daylight and the
Southern way is to wait until dark and come wearing masks. The mob
disperses. Huck then goes to the circus, a "splendid" show, whose clown
manages to come up with fantastic one-liners in a remarkably short amount
of time. A performer, pretending to be a drunk, forces himself into the
ring and tries to ride a horse, apparently hanging on for dear life. The
crowd roars its amusement, except for Huck, who cannot bear to watch the
poor man's danger. Only twelve people came to the Duke's performance, and
they laughed all the way through. So the Duke prints another handbill, this
time advertising a performance of "The King's Cameleopard [Girafie] or The
Royal Nonesuch." Bold letters across the bottom read, "Women and Children
Not Admitted."
Chapters 23-25 Summary
The new performance plays to a capacity audience. The Dauphin, naked
except for body paint and some "wild" accouterments, has the audience
howling with laughter. But the Duke and Dauphin are nearly attacked when
the show is ended after this brief performance. To avoid losing face, the
audience convinces the rest of the town the show is a smash, and a capacity
crowd follows the second night. As the Duke anticipated, the third night's
crowd consists of the two previous audiences coming to get their revenge.
The Duke and Huck make a getaway to the raft before the show starts. From
the three-night run, they took in four-hundred sixty-five dollars. Jim is
shocked that the royals are such "rapscallions." Huck explains that history
shows nobles to be rapscallions who constantly lie, steal, and
decapitate{describing in the process how Henry VIII started the Boston Tea
Party and wrote the Declaration of Independence. Huck doesn't see the point
in telling Jim the two are fakes; besides, they really do seem like the
real thing. Jim spends his night watches "moaning and mourning" for his
wife and two children, Johnny and Lizabeth. Though "It don't seem natural,"
Huck concludes that Jim loves his family as much as whites love theirs. Jim
is torn apart when he hears a thud in the distance, because it reminds him
of the time he beat his Lizabeth for not doing what he said, not realizing
she had been made deaf-mute by her bout with scarlet fever.
In Chapter Twenty-four, Jim complains about having to wait, frightened,
in the boat, tied up (to avoid suspicion) while the others are gone. So the
Duke dresses Jim in a calico stage robe and blue face paint, and posts a
sign, "Sick Arab{but harmless when not out of his head." Ashore and dressed
up in their newly bought clothes, the Dauphin decides to make a big
entrance by steamboat into the next town. The Dauphin calls Huck
"Adolphus," and encounters a talkative young man who tells him about the
recently deceased Peter Wilks. Wilks sent for his two brothers from
Shefield, England: Harvey, whom he had not seen since he was five, and
William, who is deaf-mute. He has left all his property to his brothers,
though it seems uncertain whether they will ever arrive. The Dauphin gets
the young traveler, who is en route to Rio de Janeiro, to tell him
everything about the Wilks. In Wilks' town, they ask after Peter Wilks,
pretending anguish when told of his death. The Dauphin even makes strange
hand signs to the Duke. "It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human
race," Huck thinks.
A crowd gathers before Wilks' house in Chapter Twenty-five, as the Duke
and Dauphin share a tearful meeting with the three Wilks daughters. The
entire town then joins in the "blubbering." "I never see anything so
disgusting," Huck thinks. Wilks' letter (which he left instead of a will)
leaves the house and three thousand dollars to his daughters, and to his
brothers, three thousand dollars, plus a tan-yard and seven thousand
dollars in real estate. The Duke and Dauphin privately count the money,
adding four-hundred fifteen dollars of their own money when the stash comes
up short of the letter's six-thousand, for appearances. They then give it
all to the Wilks women in a great show before a crowd of townspeople.
Doctor Abner Shackleford, an old friend of the deceased, interrupts to
declare them frauds, their accents ridiculously phony. He asks Mary Jane,
the oldest Wilks sister, to listen to him as a friend and turn the
impostors out. In reply, she hands the Dauphin the six thousand dollars to
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