may be said of almost every incident on that long river-drift; but this is the strength, the very essence of picaresque narrative.  It is the way things happen in reality; and the quiet, unexcited frame of mind in which Huck is prompted to set them down would seem to be the last word in literary art.  To Huck, apparently, the killing of Boggs and Colonel Sherburn’s defiance of the mob are of about the same historical importance as any other incidents of the day’s travel.  When Colonel Sherburn threw his shotgun across his arm and bade the crowd disperse Huck says: 

The crowd washed back sudden, and then broke all apart and went tearing off every which way, and Buck Harkness he heeled it after them, looking tolerable cheap.  I could a staid if I’d a wanted to, but I didn’t want to.

    I went to the circus, and loafed around the back side till the
    watchman went by, and then dived in under the tent.

That is all.  No reflections, no hysterics; a murder and a mob dispersed, all without a single moral comment.  And when the Shepherdsons had got done killing the Grangerfords, and Huck had tugged the two bodies ashore and covered Buck Grangerford’s face with a handkerchief, crying a little because Buck had been good to him, he spent no time in sentimental reflection or sermonizing, but promptly hunted up Jim and the raft and sat down to a meal of corn-dodgers, buttermilk, pork and cabbage, and greens: 

There ain’t nothing in the world so good, when it is cooked right; and while I eat my supper we talked, and had a good time.  I was powerful glad to get away from the feuds, and so was Jim to get away from the swamp.  We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all.  Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t; you feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.

It was Huck Finn’s morality that caused the book to be excluded from the Concord Library, and from other libraries here and there at a later day.  The orthodox mental attitude of certain directors of juvenile literature could not condone Huck’s looseness in the matter of statement and property rights, and in spite of New England traditions, Massachusetts librarians did not take any too kindly to his uttered principle that, after thinking it over and taking due thought on the deadly sin of abolition, he had decided that he’d go to hell rather than give Jim over to slavery.  Poor vagrant Ben Blankenship, hiding his runaway negro in an Illinois swamp, could not dream that his humanity would one day supply the moral episode of an immortal book.