about on the sand between looked like bugs crawling,
we was so high above them.
Tom he couldn’t hold himself he was so worked up
with gladness and astonishment to be in such a cele-
brated place, and he just dripped history from every
pore, seemed to me. He said he couldn’t scarcely
believe he was standing on the very identical spot the
prince flew from on the Bronze Horse. It was in the
Arabian Night times, he said. Somebody give the
prince a bronze horse with a peg in its shoulder, and
he could git on him and fly through the air like a bird,
and go all over the world, and steer it by turning the
peg, and fly high or low and land wherever he wanted
to.
When he got done telling it there was one of them
uncomfortable silences that comes, you know, when a
person has been telling a whopper and you feel sorry
for him and wish you could think of some way to
change the subject and let him down easy, but git stuck
and don’t see no way, and before you can pull your
mind together and DO something, that silence has got in
and spread itself and done the business. I was embar-
rassed, Jim he was embarrassed, and neither of us
couldn’t say a word. Well, Tom he glowered at me a
minute, and says:
“Come, out with it. What do you think?”
I says:
“Tom Sawyer, YOU don’t believe that, yourself.”
“What’s the reason I don’t? What’s to hender
me?”
“There’s one thing to hender you: it couldn’t
happen, that’s all.”
“What’s the reason it couldn’t happen?”
“You tell me the reason it COULD happen.”
“This balloon is a good enough reason it could
happen, I should reckon.”
“WHY is it?”
“WHY is it? I never saw such an idiot. Ain’t this
balloon and the bronze horse the same thing under
different names?”
“No, they’re not. One is a balloon and the other’s
a horse. It’s very different. Next you’ll be saying a
house and a cow is the same thing.”
“By Jackson, Huck’s got him ag’in! Dey ain’t no
wigglin’ outer dat!”
“Shut your head, Jim; you don’t know what you’re
talking about. And Huck don’t. Look here, Huck,
I’ll make it plain to you, so you can understand. You
see, it ain’t the mere FORM that’s got anything to do
with their being similar or unsimilar, it’s the PRINCI-
PLE involved; and the principle is the same in both.
Don’t you see, now?”
I turned it over in my mind, and says:
“Tom, it ain’t no use. Principles is all very well,
but they don’t git around that one big fact, that the
thing that a balloon can do ain’t no sort of proof of
what a horse can do.”
“Shucks, Huck, you don’t get the idea at all. Now
look here a minute — it’s perfectly plain. Don’t we
fly through the air?”
“Yes.”
“Very well. Don’t we fly high or fly low, just as
we please?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t we steer whichever way we want to?”
“Yes.”
“And don’t we land when and where we please?”
“Yes.”
“How do we move the balloon and steer it?”
“By touching the buttons.”
“NOW I reckon the thing is clear to you at last. In
the other case the moving and steering was done by
turning a peg. We touch a button, the prince turned
a peg. There ain’t an atom of difference, you see. I
knowed I could git it through your head if I stuck to it
long enough.”
He felt so happy he begun to whistle. But me and
Jim was silent, so he broke off surprised, and says:
“Looky here, Huck Finn, don’t you see it YET?”
I says:
“Tom Sawyer, I want to ask you some questions.”
“Go ahead,” he says, and I see Jim chirk up to
listen.
“As I understand it, the whole thing is in the buttons
and the peg — the rest ain’t of no consequence. A
button is one shape, a peg is another shape, but that
ain’t any matter?”
“No, that ain’t any matter, as long as they’ve both