ter all it may not have been so hard
for Huck, who could be loyal to anything. Huck was loyal to his father,
loyal to Tom Sawyer of course, loyal even to those two river tramps
and frauds, the King and the Duke, for whom he lied prodigiously, only
weakening when a new and livelier loyalty came into view--loyalty to
Mary Wilks.

The King and the Duke, by the way, are not elsewhere matched in fiction.
The Duke was patterned after a journeyman-printer Clemens had known in
Virginia City, but the King was created out of refuse from the whole
human family--"all tears and flapdoodle," the very ultimate of disrepute
and hypocrisy--so perfect a specimen that one must admire, almost love,
him. "Hain't we all the fools in town on our side? and ain't that a big
enough majority in any town?" he asks in a critical moment--a remark
which stamps him as a philosopher of classic rank. We are full of pity
at last when this pair of rapscallions ride out of the history on a
rail, and feel some of Huck's inclusive loyalty and all the sorrowful
truth of his comment: "Human beings can be awful cruel to one another."

The "poor old king" Huck calls him, and confesses how he felt "ornery
and humble and to blame, somehow," for the old scamp's misfortunes. "A
person's conscience ain't got no sense," he says, and Huck is never more
real to us, or more lovable, than in that moment. Huck is what he
is because, being made so, he cannot well be otherwise. He is a boy
throughout--such a boy as Mark Twain had known and in some degree
had been. One may pettily pick a flaw here and there in the tale's
construction if so minded, but the moral character of Huck himself is
not open to criticism. And indeed any criticism of this the greatest of
Mark Twain's tales of modern life would be as the mere scratching of the
granite of an imperishable structure. Huck Finn is a monument that no
puny pecking will destroy. It is built of indestructible blocks of human
nature; and if the blocks do not always fit, and the ornaments do not
always agree, we need not fear. Time will blur the incongruities and
moss over the mistakes. The edifice will grow more beautiful with the
years.

CLIV. THE MEMOIRS OF GENERAL GRANT

The success of Huck Finn, though sufficiently important in itself,
prepared the way for a publishing venture by the side of which it
dwindled to small proportions. One night (it was early in November,
1884), when Cable and Clemens had finished a read