f years
ago--every last rag of it gone but just one mud brick. Now a person
wouldn't ever believe that a backwoods Missouri boy that hadn't ever
been in that town before could go and hunt that place over and find that
brick, but Tom Sawyer done it. I know he done it, because I see him do
it. I was right by his very side at the time, and see him see the brick
and see him reconnize it. Well, I says to myself, how DOES he do it? Is
it knowledge, or is it instink?

Now there's the facts, just as they happened: let everybody explain it
their own way. I've ciphered over it a good deal, and it's my opinion
that some of it is knowledge but the main bulk of it is instink. The
reason is this: Tom put the brick in his pocket to give to a museum with
his name on it and the facts when he went home, and I slipped it out and
put another brick considerable like it in its place, and he didn't
know the difference--but there was a difference, you see. I think that
settles it--it's mostly instink, not knowledge. Instink tells him where
the exact PLACE is for the brick to be in, and so he reconnizes it by
the place it's in, not by the look of the brick. If it was knowledge,
not instink, he would know the brick again by the look of it the next
time he seen it--which he didn't. So it shows that for all the brag
you hear about knowledge being such a wonderful thing, instink is worth
forty of it for real unerringness. Jim says the same.

When we got back Jim dropped down and took us in, and there was a young
man there with a red skullcap and tassel on and a beautiful silk jacket
and baggy trousers with a shawl around his waist and pistols in it that
could talk English and wanted to hire to us as guide and take us to
Mecca and Medina and Central Africa and everywheres for a half a dollar
a day and his keep, and we hired him and left, and piled on the power,
and by the time we was through dinner we was over the place where the
Israelites crossed the Red Sea when Pharaoh tried to overtake them and
was caught by the waters. We stopped, then, and had a good look at the
place, and it done Jim good to see it. He said he could see it all,
now, just the way it happened; he could see the Israelites walking along
between the walls of water, and the Egyptians coming, from away off
yonder, hurrying all they could, and see them start in as the Israelites
went out, and then when they was all in, see the walls tumble together
and drown the last man of them. T