fter all we'd done for them scoundrels,
here it was all come to nothing, everything all busted up and ruined,
because they could have the heart to serve Jim such a trick as that,
and make him a slave again all his life, and amongst strangers, too,
for forty dirty dollars.

Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times better for Jim to
be a slave at home where his family was, as long as he'd _got_ to be a
slave, and so I'd better write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him to
tell Miss Watson where he was. But I soon give up that notion for two
things: she'd be mad and disgusted at his rascality and ungratefulness
for leaving her, and so she'd sell him straight down the river again;
and if she didn't, everybody naturally despises an ungrateful nigger,
and they'd make Jim feel it all the time, and so he'd feel ornery and
disgraced. And then think of _me!_ It would get all around that Huck
Finn helped a nigger to get his freedom; and if I was ever to see
anybody from that town again I'd be ready to get down and lick his
boots for shame. That's just the way: a person does a low-down thing,
and then he don't want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long
as he can hide, it ain't no disgrace. That was my fix exactly. The
more I studied about this the more my conscience went to grinding me,
and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at
last, when it hit me all of a sudden that here was the plain hand of
Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness
was being watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was
stealing a poor old woman's nigger that hadn't ever done me no harm,
and now was showing me there's One that's always on the lookout, and
ain't a-going to allow no such miserable doings to go only just so fur
and no further, I most dropped in my tracks I was so scared. Well, I
tried the best I could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself by
saying I was brung up wicked, and so I warn't so much to blame; but
something inside of me kept saying, "There was the Sunday-school, you
could 'a' gone to it; and if you'd 'a' done it they'd 'a' learnt you
there that people that acts as I'd been acting about that nigger goes
to everlasting fire."

It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I
couldn't try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I
kneeled down. But the words wouldn't come. Why wouldn't they? It
warn't no use to try