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Moments with Mark Twain

Chapter 154: The Impartial Friend
By Mark Twain
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American LiteratureEssays, Letters & SpeechesHumour

About This Book

This collection gathers curated excerpts from the author's wide-ranging output—short sketches, travel memoirs, novels, essays, and late reflections—arranged chronologically to show development of tone and technique. Selections include humorous sketches, travel-journal anecdotes, satirical social commentary, scenes from well-known fictional narratives, and essays examining religion, society, and personal beliefs. The foreword and brief contextual headings guide readers through thematic transitions and highlight recurring themes of irony, social observation, skepticism, and human foibles. The volume functions as an accessible sampler intended to represent the author's evolution and the diversity of his subjects and styles.

FROM “ONE OF HIS LATEST MEMORANDA”
(1909)

The Impartial Friend

Death—the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all—the soiled and the pure—the rich and the poor—the loved and the unloved.

1. Through an exchange of clothing with the little prince Tom Canty suddenly found himself royalty, and upon the death of Henry VIII is now king.

2. Miles Hendon, who has taken the real prince—now a wanderer—under his protection. In the course of their adventures the two have landed in prison.

3. Nigger Jim is a runaway slave to whom Huck affords protection.

4. Huck and Nigger Jim, drifting down the Mississippi on their raft have been struck by a steamboat. Jim has disappeared but Huck, making his way to shore, has been taken in by Col. Grangerford, whose family is in bitter feud with the Shepherdsons.

Edmund Clarence Stedman declared this chapter of Huck Finn’s adventures to be “as dramatic and powerful an episode as I know in modern literature.”

5. Buck Grangerford, a boy of about Huck’s age.

6. On his arrival at the Grangerford home Huck had given his name as George Jackson.

7. The Yankee and his captor have arrived at Camelot and are in King Arthur’s castle.

8. The Yankee with the maid, Alisande, a great talker, is on the way to rescue the imprisoned princesses.

9. The King and the Yankee travelling in disguise have fallen into the clutches of a slave-dealer.

THE END
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
  1. P. 44, changed "even the" to "even in the".
  2. P. 49, changed "never revoked" to "never been revoked".
  3. P. 126, changed "“Oh, don’t I!”" to "“Oh, don’t I!” said Joe,".
  4. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.
  5. Anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.
  6. Footnotes have been re-indexed using numbers and collected together at the end of the last chapter.