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Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is part of HackerNoon’s Book Blog Post series. You can jump to any chapter in this book . here CHAPTER XXX. When they got aboard the king went for me, and shook me by the collar, and says: “Tryin’ to give us the slip, was ye, you pup! Tired of our company, hey?” I says: “No, your majesty, we warn’t—please don’t, your majesty!” “Quick, then, and tell us what was your idea, or I’ll shake the insides out o’ you!” “Honest, I’ll tell you everything just as it happened, your majesty. The man that had a-holt of me was very good to me, and kept saying he had a boy about as big as me that died last year, and he was sorry to see a boy in such a dangerous fix; and when they was all took by surprise by finding the gold, and made a rush for the coffin, he lets go of me and whispers, ‘Heel it now, or they’ll hang ye, sure!’ and I lit out. It didn’t seem no good for me to stay—I couldn’t do nothing, and I didn’t want to be hung if I could get away. So I never stopped running till I found the canoe; and when I got here I told Jim to hurry, or they’d catch me and hang me yet, and said I was afeard you and the duke wasn’t alive now, and I was awful sorry, and so was Jim, and was awful glad when we see you coming; you may ask Jim if I didn’t.” Jim said it was so; and the king told him to shut up, and said, “Oh, yes, it’s mighty likely!” and shook me up again, and said he reckoned he’d drownd me. But the duke says: “Leggo the boy, you old idiot! Would you a done any different? Did you inquire around for him when you got loose? I don’t remember it.” So the king let go of me, and begun to cuss that town and everybody in it. But the duke says: “You better a blame’ sight give yourself a good cussing, for you’re the one that’s entitled to it most. You hain’t done a thing from the start that had any sense in it, except coming out so cool and cheeky with that imaginary blue-arrow mark. That was bright—it was right down bully; and it was the thing that saved us. For if it hadn’t been for that they’d a jailed us till them Englishmen’s baggage come—and then—the penitentiary, you bet! But that trick took ’em to the graveyard, and the gold done us a still bigger kindness; for if the excited fools hadn’t let go all holts and made that rush to get a look we’d a slept in our cravats to-night—cravats warranted to wear, too—longer than we’d need ’em.” They was still a minute—thinking; then the king says, kind of absent-minded like: “Mf! And we reckoned the niggers stole it!” That made me squirm! “Yes,” says the duke, kinder slow and deliberate and sarcastic, “we did.” After about a half a minute the king drawls out: “Leastways, I did.” The duke says, the same way: “On the contrary, I did.” The king kind of ruffles up, and says: “Looky here, Bilgewater, what’r you referrin’ to?” The duke says, pretty brisk: “When it comes to that, maybe you’ll let me ask, what was you referring to?” “Shucks!” says the king, very sarcastic; “but I don’t know—maybe you was asleep, and didn’t know what you was about.” The duke bristles up now, and says: “Oh, let up on this cussed nonsense; do you take me for a blame’ fool? Don’t you reckon I know who hid that money in that coffin?” “Yes, sir! I know you do know, because you done it yourself!” “It’s a lie!”—and the duke went for him. The king sings out: “Take y’r hands off!—leggo my throat!—I take it all back!” The duke says: “Well, you just own up, first, that you did hide that money there, intending to give me the slip one of these days, and come back and dig it up, and have it all to yourself.” “Wait jest a minute, duke—answer me this one question, honest and fair; if you didn’t put the money there, say it, and I’ll b’lieve you, and take back everything I said.” “You old scoundrel, I didn’t, and you know I didn’t. There, now!” “Well, then, I b’lieve you. But answer me only jest this one more—now don’t git mad; didn’t you have it in your mind to hook the money and hide it?” The duke never said nothing for a little bit; then he says: “Well, I don’t care if I did, I didn’t do it, anyway. But you not only had it in mind to do it, but you done it.” “I wisht I never die if I done it, duke, and that’s honest. I won’t say I warn’t goin’ to do it, because I was; but you—I mean somebody—got in ahead o’ me.” “It’s a lie! You done it, and you got to say you done it, or—” The king began to gurgle, and then he gasps out: “’Nough!—I own up!” I was very glad to hear him say that; it made me feel much more easier than what I was feeling before. So the duke took his hands off and says: “If you ever deny it again I’ll drown you. It’s well for you to set there and blubber like a baby—it’s fitten for you, after the way you’ve acted. I never see such an old ostrich for wanting to gobble everything—and I a-trusting you all the time, like you was my own father. You ought to been ashamed of yourself to stand by and hear it saddled on to a lot of poor niggers, and you never say a word for ’em. It makes me feel ridiculous to think I was soft enough to believe that rubbage. Cuss you, I can see now why you was so anxious to make up the deffisit—you wanted to get what money I’d got out of the Nonesuch and one thing or another, and scoop it all!” The king says, timid, and still a-snuffling: “Why, duke, it was you that said make up the deffisit; it warn’t me.” “Dry up! I don’t want to hear no more out of you!” says the duke. “And now you see what you GOT by it. They’ve got all their own money back, and all of ourn but a shekel or two besides. G’long to bed, and don’t you deffersit me no more deffersits, long ’s you live!” So the king sneaked into the wigwam and took to his bottle for comfort, and before long the duke tackled HIS bottle; and so in about a half an hour they was as thick as thieves again, and the tighter they got the lovinger they got, and went off a-snoring in each other’s arms. They both got powerful mellow, but I noticed the king didn’t get mellow enough to forget to remember to not deny about hiding the money-bag again. That made me feel easy and satisfied. Of course when they got to snoring we had a long gabble, and I told Jim everything. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved April 2022 from Twain, Mark,1993. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/76/76-h/76-h.htm#c30 This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at , located at . www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html Photo by on Zlaťáky.cz Unsplash

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Chapter XXX

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is part of HackerNoon’s Book Blog Post series. You can jump to any chapter in this book . here CHAPTER XXIV. Next day, towards night, we laid up under a little willow towhead out in the middle, where there was a village on each side of the river, and the duke and the king begun to lay out a plan for working them towns. Jim he spoke to the duke, and said he hoped it wouldn’t take but a few hours, because it got mighty heavy and tiresome to him when he had to lay all day in the wigwam tied with the rope. You see, when we left him all alone we had to tie him, because if anybody happened on to him all by himself and not tied it wouldn’t look much like he was a runaway nigger, you know. So the duke said it was kind of hard to have to lay roped all day, and he’d cipher out some way to get around it. He was uncommon bright, the duke was, and he soon struck it. He dressed Jim up in King Lear’s outfit—it was a long curtain-calico gown, and a white horse-hair wig and whiskers; and then he took his theater paint and painted Jim’s face and hands and ears and neck all over a dead, dull, solid blue, like a man that’s been drownded nine days. Blamed if he warn’t the horriblest looking outrage I ever see. Then the duke took and wrote out a sign on a shingle so: Sick Arab—but harmless when not out of his head. And he nailed that shingle to a lath, and stood the lath up four or five foot in front of the wigwam. Jim was satisfied. He said it was a sight better than lying tied a couple of years every day, and trembling all over every time there was a sound. The duke told him to make himself free and easy, and if anybody ever come meddling around, he must hop out of the wigwam, and carry on a little, and fetch a howl or two like a wild beast, and he reckoned they would light out and leave him alone. Which was sound enough judgment; but you take the average man, and he wouldn’t wait for him to howl. Why, he didn’t only look like he was dead, he looked considerable more than that. These rapscallions wanted to try the Nonesuch again, because there was so much money in it, but they judged it wouldn’t be safe, because maybe the news might a worked along down by this time. They couldn’t hit no project that suited exactly; so at last the duke said he reckoned he’d lay off and work his brains an hour or two and see if he couldn’t put up something on the Arkansaw village; and the king he allowed he would drop over to t’other village without any plan, but just trust in Providence to lead him the profitable way—meaning the devil, I reckon. We had all bought store clothes where we stopped last; and now the king put his’n on, and he told me to put mine on. I done it, of course. The king’s duds was all black, and he did look real swell and starchy. I never knowed how clothes could change a body before. Why, before, he looked like the orneriest old rip that ever was; but now, when he’d take off his new white beaver and make a bow and do a smile, he looked that grand and good and pious that you’d say he had walked right out of the ark, and maybe was old Leviticus himself. Jim cleaned up the canoe, and I got my paddle ready. There was a big steamboat laying at the shore away up under the point, about three mile above the town—been there a couple of hours, taking on freight. Says the king: “Seein’ how I’m dressed, I reckon maybe I better arrive down from St. Louis or Cincinnati, or some other big place. Go for the steamboat, Huckleberry; we’ll come down to the village on her.” I didn’t have to be ordered twice to go and take a steamboat ride. I fetched the shore a half a mile above the village, and then went scooting along the bluff bank in the easy water. Pretty soon we come to a nice innocent-looking young country jake setting on a log swabbing the sweat off of his face, for it was powerful warm weather; and he had a couple of big carpet-bags by him. “Run her nose in shore,” says the king. I done it. “Wher’ you bound for, young man?” “For the steamboat; going to Orleans.” “Git aboard,” says the king. “Hold on a minute, my servant ’ll he’p you with them bags. Jump out and he’p the gentleman, Adolphus”—meaning me, I see. I done so, and then we all three started on again. The young chap was mighty thankful; said it was tough work toting his baggage such weather. He asked the king where he was going, and the king told him he’d come down the river and landed at the other village this morning, and now he was going up a few mile to see an old friend on a farm up there. The young fellow says: “When I first see you I says to myself, ‘It’s Mr. Wilks, sure, and he come mighty near getting here in time.’ But then I says again, ‘No, I reckon it ain’t him, or else he wouldn’t be paddling up the river.’ You ain’t him, are you?” “No, my name’s Blodgett—Elexander Blodgett—Reverend Elexander Blodgett, I s’pose I must say, as I’m one o’ the Lord’s poor servants. But still I’m jist as able to be sorry for Mr. Wilks for not arriving in time, all the same, if he’s missed anything by it—which I hope he hasn’t.” “Well, he don’t miss any property by it, because he’ll get that all right; but he’s missed seeing his brother Peter die—which he mayn’t mind, nobody can tell as to that—but his brother would a give anything in this world to see him before he died; never talked about nothing else all these three weeks; hadn’t seen him since they was boys together—and hadn’t ever seen his brother William at all—that’s the deef and dumb one—William ain’t more than thirty or thirty-five. Peter and George were the only ones that come out here; George was the married brother; him and his wife both died last year. Harvey and William’s the only ones that’s left now; and, as I was saying, they haven’t got here in time.” “Did anybody send ’em word?” “Oh, yes; a month or two ago, when Peter was first took; because Peter said then that he sorter felt like he warn’t going to get well this time. You see, he was pretty old, and George’s g’yirls was too young to be much company for him, except Mary Jane, the red-headed one; and so he was kinder lonesome after George and his wife died, and didn’t seem to care much to live. He most desperately wanted to see Harvey—and William, too, for that matter—because he was one of them kind that can’t bear to make a will. He left a letter behind for Harvey, and said he’d told in it where his money was hid, and how he wanted the rest of the property divided up so George’s g’yirls would be all right—for George didn’t leave nothing. And that letter was all they could get him to put a pen to.” “Why do you reckon Harvey don’t come? Wher’ does he live?” “Oh, he lives in England—Sheffield—preaches there—hasn’t ever been in this country. He hasn’t had any too much time—and besides he mightn’t a got the letter at all, you know.” “Too bad, too bad he couldn’t a lived to see his brothers, poor soul. You going to Orleans, you say?” “Yes, but that ain’t only a part of it. I’m going in a ship, next Wednesday, for Ryo Janeero, where my uncle lives.” “It’s a pretty long journey. But it’ll be lovely; wisht I was a-going. Is Mary Jane the oldest? How old is the others?” “Mary Jane’s nineteen, Susan’s fifteen, and Joanna’s about fourteen—that’s the one that gives herself to good works and has a hare-lip.” “Poor things! to be left alone in the cold world so.” “Well, they could be worse off. Old Peter had friends, and they ain’t going to let them come to no harm. There’s Hobson, the Babtis’ preacher; and Deacon Lot Hovey, and Ben Rucker, and Abner Shackleford, and Levi Bell, the lawyer; and Dr. Robinson, and their wives, and the widow Bartley, and—well, there’s a lot of them; but these are the ones that Peter was thickest with, and used to write about sometimes, when he wrote home; so Harvey ’ll know where to look for friends when he gets here.” Well, the old man went on asking questions till he just fairly emptied that young fellow. Blamed if he didn’t inquire about everybody and everything in that blessed town, and all about the Wilkses; and about Peter’s business—which was a tanner; and about George’s—which was a carpenter; and about Harvey’s—which was a dissentering minister; and so on, and so on. Then he says: “What did you want to walk all the way up to the steamboat for?” “Because she’s a big Orleans boat, and I was afeard she mightn’t stop there. When they’re deep they won’t stop for a hail. A Cincinnati boat will, but this is a St. Louis one.” “Was Peter Wilks well off?” “Oh, yes, pretty well off. He had houses and land, and it’s reckoned he left three or four thousand in cash hid up som’ers.” “When did you say he died?” “I didn’t say, but it was last night.” “Funeral to-morrow, likely?” “Yes, ’bout the middle of the day.” “Well, it’s all terrible sad; but we’ve all got to go, one time or another. So what we want to do is to be prepared; then we’re all right.” “Yes, sir, it’s the best way. Ma used to always say that.” When we struck the boat she was about done loading, and pretty soon she got off. The king never said nothing about going aboard, so I lost my ride, after all. When the boat was gone the king made me paddle up another mile to a lonesome place, and then he got ashore and says: “Now hustle back, right off, and fetch the duke up here, and the new carpet-bags. And if he’s gone over to t’other side, go over there and git him. And tell him to git himself up regardless. Shove along, now.” I see what he was up to; but I never said nothing, of course. When I got back with the duke we hid the canoe, and then they set down on a log, and the king told him everything, just like the young fellow had said it—every last word of it. And all the time he was a-doing it he tried to talk like an Englishman; and he done it pretty well, too, for a slouch. I can’t imitate him, and so I ain’t a-going to try to; but he really done it pretty good. Then he says: “How are you on the deef and dumb, Bilgewater?” The duke said, leave him alone for that; said he had played a deef and dumb person on the histronic boards. So then they waited for a steamboat. About the middle of the afternoon a couple of little boats come along, but they didn’t come from high enough up the river; but at last there was a big one, and they hailed her. She sent out her yawl, and we went aboard, and she was from Cincinnati; and when they found we only wanted to go four or five mile they was booming mad, and gave us a cussing, and said they wouldn’t land us. But the king was ca’m. He says: “If gentlemen kin afford to pay a dollar a mile apiece to be took on and put off in a yawl, a steamboat kin afford to carry ’em, can’t it?” So they softened down and said it was all right; and when we got to the village they yawled us ashore. About two dozen men flocked down when they see the yawl a-coming, and when the king says: “Kin any of you gentlemen tell me wher’ Mr. Peter Wilks lives?” they give a glance at one another, and nodded their heads, as much as to say, “What d’ I tell you?” Then one of them says, kind of soft and gentle: “I’m sorry sir, but the best we can do is to tell you where he did live yesterday evening.” Sudden as winking the ornery old cretur went an to smash, and fell up against the man, and put his chin on his shoulder, and cried down his back, and says: “Alas, alas, our poor brother—gone, and we never got to see him; oh, it’s too, too hard!” Then he turns around, blubbering, and makes a lot of idiotic signs to the duke on his hands, and blamed if he didn’t drop a carpet-bag and bust out a-crying. If they warn’t the beatenest lot, them two frauds, that ever I struck. Well, the men gathered around and sympathized with them, and said all sorts of kind things to them, and carried their carpet-bags up the hill for them, and let them lean on them and cry, and told the king all about his brother’s last moments, and the king he told it all over again on his hands to the duke, and both of them took on about that dead tanner like they’d lost the twelve disciples. Well, if ever I struck anything like it, I’m a nigger. It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved April 2022 from Twain, Mark,1993. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/76/76-h/76-h.htm#c24 This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at , located at . www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html Photo by on Michael Unsplash

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Chapter XXIV

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is part of HackerNoon’s Book Blog Post series. You can jump to any chapter in this book . here CHAPTER XXI. It was after sun-up now, but we went right on and didn’t tie up. The king and the duke turned out by and by looking pretty rusty; but after they’d jumped overboard and took a swim it chippered them up a good deal. After breakfast the king he took a seat on the corner of the raft, and pulled off his boots and rolled up his britches, and let his legs dangle in the water, so as to be comfortable, and lit his pipe, and went to getting his Romeo and Juliet by heart. When he had got it pretty good him and the duke begun to practice it together. The duke had to learn him over and over again how to say every speech; and he made him sigh, and put his hand on his heart, and after a while he said he done it pretty well; “only,” he says, “you mustn’t bellow out Romeo! that way, like a bull—you must say it soft and sick and languishy, so—R-o-o-meo! that is the idea; for Juliet’s a dear sweet mere child of a girl, you know, and she doesn’t bray like a jackass.” Well, next they got out a couple of long swords that the duke made out of oak laths, and begun to practice the sword fight—the duke called himself Richard III.; and the way they laid on and pranced around the raft was grand to see. But by and by the king tripped and fell overboard, and after that they took a rest, and had a talk about all kinds of adventures they’d had in other times along the river. After dinner the duke says: “Well, Capet, we’ll want to make this a first-class show, you know, so I guess we’ll add a little more to it. We want a little something to answer encores with, anyway.” “What’s onkores, Bilgewater?” The duke told him, and then says: “I’ll answer by doing the Highland fling or the sailor’s hornpipe; and you—well, let me see—oh, I’ve got it—you can do Hamlet’s soliloquy.” “Hamlet’s which?” “Hamlet’s soliloquy, you know; the most celebrated thing in Shakespeare. Ah, it’s sublime, sublime! Always fetches the house. I haven’t got it in the book—I’ve only got one volume—but I reckon I can piece it out from memory. I’ll just walk up and down a minute, and see if I can call it back from recollection’s vaults.” So he went to marching up and down, thinking, and frowning horrible every now and then; then he would hoist up his eyebrows; next he would squeeze his hand on his forehead and stagger back and kind of moan; next he would sigh, and next he’d let on to drop a tear. It was beautiful to see him. By and by he got it. He told us to give attention. Then he strikes a most noble attitude, with one leg shoved forwards, and his arms stretched away up, and his head tilted back, looking up at the sky; and then he begins to rip and rave and grit his teeth; and after that, all through his speech, he howled, and spread around, and swelled up his chest, and just knocked the spots out of any acting ever I see before. This is the speech—I learned it, easy enough, while he was learning it to the king: To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life; For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane, But that the fear of something after death Murders the innocent sleep, Great nature’s second course, And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune Than fly to others that we know not of. There’s the respect must give us pause: Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The law’s delay, and the quietus which his pangs might take. In the dead waste and middle of the night, when churchyards yawn In customary suits of solemn black, But that the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns, Breathes forth contagion on the world, And thus the native hue of resolution, like the poor cat i’ the adage, Is sicklied o’er with care. And all the clouds that lowered o’er our housetops, With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action. ’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. But soft you, the fair Ophelia: Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws. But get thee to a nunnery—go! Well, the old man he liked that speech, and he mighty soon got it so he could do it first rate. It seemed like he was just born for it; and when he had his hand in and was excited, it was perfectly lovely the way he would rip and tear and rair up behind when he was getting it off. The first chance we got, the duke he had some show bills printed; and after that, for two or three days as we floated along, the raft was a most uncommon lively place, for there warn’t nothing but sword-fighting and rehearsing—as the duke called it—going on all the time. One morning, when we was pretty well down the State of Arkansaw, we come in sight of a little one-horse town in a big bend; so we tied up about three-quarters of a mile above it, in the mouth of a crick which was shut in like a tunnel by the cypress trees, and all of us but Jim took the canoe and went down there to see if there was any chance in that place for our show. We struck it mighty lucky; there was going to be a circus there that afternoon, and the country people was already beginning to come in, in all kinds of old shackly wagons, and on horses. The circus would leave before night, so our show would have a pretty good chance. The duke he hired the court house, and we went around and stuck up our bills. They read like this: Then we went loafing around the town. The stores and houses was most all old shackly dried-up frame concerns that hadn’t ever been painted; they was set up three or four foot above ground on stilts, so as to be out of reach of the water when the river was overflowed. The houses had little gardens around them, but they didn’t seem to raise hardly anything in them but jimpson weeds, and sunflowers, and ash-piles, and old curled-up boots and shoes, and pieces of bottles, and rags, and played-out tin-ware. The fences was made of different kinds of boards, nailed on at different times; and they leaned every which-way, and had gates that didn’t generly have but one hinge—a leather one. Some of the fences had been whitewashed, some time or another, but the duke said it was in Clumbus’s time, like enough. There was generly hogs in the garden, and people driving them out. All the stores was along one street. They had white domestic awnings in front, and the country people hitched their horses to the awning-posts. There was empty drygoods boxes under the awnings, and loafers roosting on them all day long, whittling them with their Barlow knives; and chawing tobacco, and gaping and yawning and stretching—a mighty ornery lot. They generly had on yellow straw hats most as wide as an umbrella, but didn’t wear no coats nor waistcoats, they called one another Bill, and Buck, and Hank, and Joe, and Andy, and talked lazy and drawly, and used considerable many cuss words. There was as many as one loafer leaning up against every awning-post, and he most always had his hands in his britches-pockets, except when he fetched them out to lend a chaw of tobacco or scratch. What a body was hearing amongst them all the time was: “Gimme a chaw ’v tobacker, Hank.” “Cain’t; I hain’t got but one chaw left. Ask Bill.” Maybe Bill he gives him a chaw; maybe he lies and says he ain’t got none. Some of them kinds of loafers never has a cent in the world, nor a chaw of tobacco of their own. They get all their chawing by borrowing; they say to a fellow, “I wisht you’d len’ me a chaw, Jack, I jist this minute give Ben Thompson the last chaw I had”—which is a lie pretty much everytime; it don’t fool nobody but a stranger; but Jack ain’t no stranger, so he says: “You give him a chaw, did you? So did your sister’s cat’s grandmother. You pay me back the chaws you’ve awready borry’d off’n me, Lafe Buckner, then I’ll loan you one or two ton of it, and won’t charge you no back intrust, nuther.” “Well, I did pay you back some of it wunst.” “Yes, you did—’bout six chaws. You borry’d store tobacker and paid back nigger-head.” Store tobacco is flat black plug, but these fellows mostly chaws the natural leaf twisted. When they borrow a chaw they don’t generly cut it off with a knife, but set the plug in between their teeth, and gnaw with their teeth and tug at the plug with their hands till they get it in two; then sometimes the one that owns the tobacco looks mournful at it when it’s handed back, and says, sarcastic: “Here, gimme the chaw, and you take the plug.” All the streets and lanes was just mud; they warn’t nothing else but mud—mud as black as tar and nigh about a foot deep in some places, and two or three inches deep in all the places. The hogs loafed and grunted around everywheres. You’d see a muddy sow and a litter of pigs come lazying along the street and whollop herself right down in the way, where folks had to walk around her, and she’d stretch out and shut her eyes and wave her ears whilst the pigs was milking her, and look as happy as if she was on salary. And pretty soon you’d hear a loafer sing out, “Hi! so boy! sick him, Tige!” and away the sow would go, squealing most horrible, with a dog or two swinging to each ear, and three or four dozen more a-coming; and then you would see all the loafers get up and watch the thing out of sight, and laugh at the fun and look grateful for the noise. Then they’d settle back again till there was a dog fight. There couldn’t anything wake them up all over, and make them happy all over, like a dog fight—unless it might be putting turpentine on a stray dog and setting fire to him, or tying a tin pan to his tail and see him run himself to death. On the river front some of the houses was sticking out over the bank, and they was bowed and bent, and about ready to tumble in. The people had moved out of them. The bank was caved away under one corner of some others, and that corner was hanging over. People lived in them yet, but it was dangersome, because sometimes a strip of land as wide as a house caves in at a time. Sometimes a belt of land a quarter of a mile deep will start in and cave along and cave along till it all caves into the river in one summer. Such a town as that has to be always moving back, and back, and back, because the river’s always gnawing at it. The nearer it got to noon that day the thicker and thicker was the wagons and horses in the streets, and more coming all the time. Families fetched their dinners with them from the country, and eat them in the wagons. There was considerable whisky drinking going on, and I seen three fights. By and by somebody sings out: “Here comes old Boggs!—in from the country for his little old monthly drunk; here he comes, boys!” All the loafers looked glad; I reckoned they was used to having fun out of Boggs. One of them says: “Wonder who he’s a-gwyne to chaw up this time. If he’d a-chawed up all the men he’s ben a-gwyne to chaw up in the last twenty year he’d have considerable ruputation now.” Another one says, “I wisht old Boggs ’d threaten me, ’cuz then I’d know I warn’t gwyne to die for a thousan’ year.” Boggs comes a-tearing along on his horse, whooping and yelling like an Injun, and singing out: “Cler the track, thar. I’m on the waw-path, and the price uv coffins is a-gwyne to raise.” He was drunk, and weaving about in his saddle; he was over fifty year old, and had a very red face. Everybody yelled at him and laughed at him and sassed him, and he sassed back, and said he’d attend to them and lay them out in their regular turns, but he couldn’t wait now because he’d come to town to kill old Colonel Sherburn, and his motto was, “Meat first, and spoon vittles to top off on.” He see me, and rode up and says: “Whar’d you come f’m, boy? You prepared to die?” Then he rode on. I was scared, but a man says: “He don’t mean nothing; he’s always a-carryin’ on like that when he’s drunk. He’s the best naturedest old fool in Arkansaw—never hurt nobody, drunk nor sober.” Boggs rode up before the biggest store in town, and bent his head down so he could see under the curtain of the awning and yells: “Come out here, Sherburn! Come out and meet the man you’ve swindled. You’re the houn’ I’m after, and I’m a-gwyne to have you, too!” And so he went on, calling Sherburn everything he could lay his tongue to, and the whole street packed with people listening and laughing and going on. By and by a proud-looking man about fifty-five—and he was a heap the best dressed man in that town, too—steps out of the store, and the crowd drops back on each side to let him come. He says to Boggs, mighty ca’m and slow—he says: “I’m tired of this, but I’ll endure it till one o’clock. Till one o’clock, mind—no longer. If you open your mouth against me only once after that time you can’t travel so far but I will find you.” Then he turns and goes in. The crowd looked mighty sober; nobody stirred, and there warn’t no more laughing. Boggs rode off blackguarding Sherburn as loud as he could yell, all down the street; and pretty soon back he comes and stops before the store, still keeping it up. Some men crowded around him and tried to get him to shut up, but he wouldn’t; they told him it would be one o’clock in about fifteen minutes, and so he must go home—he must go right away. But it didn’t do no good. He cussed away with all his might, and throwed his hat down in the mud and rode over it, and pretty soon away he went a-raging down the street again, with his gray hair a-flying. Everybody that could get a chance at him tried their best to coax him off of his horse so they could lock him up and get him sober; but it warn’t no use—up the street he would tear again, and give Sherburn another cussing. By and by somebody says: “Go for his daughter!—quick, go for his daughter; sometimes he’ll listen to her. If anybody can persuade him, she can.” So somebody started on a run. I walked down street a ways and stopped. In about five or ten minutes here comes Boggs again, but not on his horse. He was a-reeling across the street towards me, bare-headed, with a friend on both sides of him a-holt of his arms and hurrying him along. He was quiet, and looked uneasy; and he warn’t hanging back any, but was doing some of the hurrying himself. Somebody sings out: “Boggs!” I looked over there to see who said it, and it was that Colonel Sherburn. He was standing perfectly still in the street, and had a pistol raised in his right hand—not aiming it, but holding it out with the barrel tilted up towards the sky. The same second I see a young girl coming on the run, and two men with her. Boggs and the men turned round to see who called him, and when they see the pistol the men jumped to one side, and the pistol-barrel come down slow and steady to a level—both barrels cocked. Boggs throws up both of his hands and says, “O Lord, don’t shoot!” Bang! goes the first shot, and he staggers back, clawing at the air—bang! goes the second one, and he tumbles backwards on to the ground, heavy and solid, with his arms spread out. That young girl screamed out and comes rushing, and down she throws herself on her father, crying, and saying, “Oh, he’s killed him, he’s killed him!” The crowd closed up around them, and shouldered and jammed one another, with their necks stretched, trying to see, and people on the inside trying to shove them back and shouting, “Back, back! give him air, give him air!” Colonel Sherburn he tossed his pistol on to the ground, and turned around on his heels and walked off. They took Boggs to a little drug store, the crowd pressing around just the same, and the whole town following, and I rushed and got a good place at the window, where I was close to him and could see in. They laid him on the floor and put one large Bible under his head, and opened another one and spread it on his breast; but they tore open his shirt first, and I seen where one of the bullets went in. He made about a dozen long gasps, his breast lifting the Bible up when he drawed in his breath, and letting it down again when he breathed it out—and after that he laid still; he was dead. Then they pulled his daughter away from him, screaming and crying, and took her off. She was about sixteen, and very sweet and gentle looking, but awful pale and scared. Well, pretty soon the whole town was there, squirming and scrouging and pushing and shoving to get at the window and have a look, but people that had the places wouldn’t give them up, and folks behind them was saying all the time, “Say, now, you’ve looked enough, you fellows; ’tain’t right and ’tain’t fair for you to stay thar all the time, and never give nobody a chance; other folks has their rights as well as you.” There was considerable jawing back, so I slid out, thinking maybe there was going to be trouble. The streets was full, and everybody was excited. Everybody that seen the shooting was telling how it happened, and there was a big crowd packed around each one of these fellows, stretching their necks and listening. One long, lanky man, with long hair and a big white fur stovepipe hat on the back of his head, and a crooked-handled cane, marked out the places on the ground where Boggs stood and where Sherburn stood, and the people following him around from one place to t’other and watching everything he done, and bobbing their heads to show they understood, and stooping a little and resting their hands on their thighs to watch him mark the places on the ground with his cane; and then he stood up straight and stiff where Sherburn had stood, frowning and having his hat-brim down over his eyes, and sung out, “Boggs!” and then fetched his cane down slow to a level, and says “Bang!” staggered backwards, says “Bang!” again, and fell down flat on his back. The people that had seen the thing said he done it perfect; said it was just exactly the way it all happened. Then as much as a dozen people got out their bottles and treated him. Well, by and by somebody said Sherburn ought to be lynched. In about a minute everybody was saying it; so away they went, mad and yelling, and snatching down every clothes-line they come to to do the hanging with. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved April 2022 from Twain, Mark,1993. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/76/76-h/76-h.htm#c21 This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at , located at . www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html Photo by on Axel Holen Unsplash

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Chapter XXI

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is part of HackerNoon’s Book Blog Post series. You can jump to any chapter in this book . here CHAPTER XX. They asked us considerable many questions; wanted to know what we covered up the raft that way for, and laid by in the daytime instead of running—was Jim a runaway nigger? Says I: “Goodness sakes! would a runaway nigger run south?” No, they allowed he wouldn’t. I had to account for things some way, so I says: “My folks was living in Pike County, in Missouri, where I was born, and they all died off but me and pa and my brother Ike. Pa, he ’lowed he’d break up and go down and live with Uncle Ben, who’s got a little one-horse place on the river, forty-four mile below Orleans. Pa was pretty poor, and had some debts; so when he’d squared up there warn’t nothing left but sixteen dollars and our nigger, Jim. That warn’t enough to take us fourteen hundred mile, deck passage nor no other way. Well, when the river rose pa had a streak of luck one day; he ketched this piece of a raft; so we reckoned we’d go down to Orleans on it. Pa’s luck didn’t hold out; a steamboat run over the forrard corner of the raft one night, and we all went overboard and dove under the wheel; Jim and me come up all right, but pa was drunk, and Ike was only four years old, so they never come up no more. Well, for the next day or two we had considerable trouble, because people was always coming out in skiffs and trying to take Jim away from me, saying they believed he was a runaway nigger. We don’t run daytimes no more now; nights they don’t bother us.” The duke says: “Leave me alone to cipher out a way so we can run in the daytime if we want to. I’ll think the thing over—I’ll invent a plan that’ll fix it. We’ll let it alone for to-day, because of course we don’t want to go by that town yonder in daylight—it mightn’t be healthy.” Towards night it begun to darken up and look like rain; the heat lightning was squirting around low down in the sky, and the leaves was beginning to shiver—it was going to be pretty ugly, it was easy to see that. So the duke and the king went to overhauling our wigwam, to see what the beds was like. My bed was a straw tick better than Jim’s, which was a corn-shuck tick; there’s always cobs around about in a shuck tick, and they poke into you and hurt; and when you roll over the dry shucks sound like you was rolling over in a pile of dead leaves; it makes such a rustling that you wake up. Well, the duke allowed he would take my bed; but the king allowed he wouldn’t. He says: “I should a reckoned the difference in rank would a sejested to you that a corn-shuck bed warn’t just fitten for me to sleep on. Your Grace ’ll take the shuck bed yourself.” Jim and me was in a sweat again for a minute, being afraid there was going to be some more trouble amongst them; so we was pretty glad when the duke says: “’Tis my fate to be always ground into the mire under the iron heel of oppression. Misfortune has broken my once haughty spirit; I yield, I submit; ’tis my fate. I am alone in the world—let me suffer; can bear it.” We got away as soon as it was good and dark. The king told us to stand well out towards the middle of the river, and not show a light till we got a long ways below the town. We come in sight of the little bunch of lights by and by—that was the town, you know—and slid by, about a half a mile out, all right. When we was three-quarters of a mile below we hoisted up our signal lantern; and about ten o’clock it come on to rain and blow and thunder and lighten like everything; so the king told us to both stay on watch till the weather got better; then him and the duke crawled into the wigwam and turned in for the night. It was my watch below till twelve, but I wouldn’t a turned in anyway if I’d had a bed, because a body don’t see such a storm as that every day in the week, not by a long sight. My souls, how the wind did scream along! And every second or two there’d come a glare that lit up the white-caps for a half a mile around, and you’d see the islands looking dusty through the rain, and the trees thrashing around in the wind; then comes a H-WHACK!—bum! bum! bumble-umble-um-bum-bum-bum-bum—and the thunder would go rumbling and grumbling away, and quit—and then RIP comes another flash and another sockdolager. The waves most washed me off the raft sometimes, but I hadn’t any clothes on, and didn’t mind. We didn’t have no trouble about snags; the lightning was glaring and flittering around so constant that we could see them plenty soon enough to throw her head this way or that and miss them. I had the middle watch, you know, but I was pretty sleepy by that time, so Jim he said he would stand the first half of it for me; he was always mighty good that way, Jim was. I crawled into the wigwam, but the king and the duke had their legs sprawled around so there warn’t no show for me; so I laid outside—I didn’t mind the rain, because it was warm, and the waves warn’t running so high now. About two they come up again, though, and Jim was going to call me; but he changed his mind, because he reckoned they warn’t high enough yet to do any harm; but he was mistaken about that, for pretty soon all of a sudden along comes a regular ripper and washed me overboard. It most killed Jim a-laughing. He was the easiest nigger to laugh that ever was, anyway. I took the watch, and Jim he laid down and snored away; and by and by the storm let up for good and all; and the first cabin-light that showed I rousted him out, and we slid the raft into hiding quarters for the day. The king got out an old ratty deck of cards after breakfast, and him and the duke played seven-up a while, five cents a game. Then they got tired of it, and allowed they would “lay out a campaign,” as they called it. The duke went down into his carpet-bag, and fetched up a lot of little printed bills and read them out loud. One bill said, “The celebrated Dr. Armand de Montalban, of Paris,” would “lecture on the Science of Phrenology” at such and such a place, on the blank day of blank, at ten cents admission, and “furnish charts of character at twenty-five cents apiece.” The duke said that was him. In another bill he was the “world-renowned Shakespearian tragedian, Garrick the Younger, of Drury Lane, London.” In other bills he had a lot of other names and done other wonderful things, like finding water and gold with a “divining-rod,” “dissipating witch spells,” and so on. By and by he says: “But the histrionic muse is the darling. Have you ever trod the boards, Royalty?” “No,” says the king. “You shall, then, before you’re three days older, Fallen Grandeur,” says the duke. “The first good town we come to we’ll hire a hall and do the sword fight in Richard III. and the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet. How does that strike you?” “I’m in, up to the hub, for anything that will pay, Bilgewater; but, you see, I don’t know nothing about play-actin’, and hain’t ever seen much of it. I was too small when pap used to have ’em at the palace. Do you reckon you can learn me?” “Easy!” “All right. I’m jist a-freezn’ for something fresh, anyway. Le’s commence right away.” So the duke he told him all about who Romeo was and who Juliet was, and said he was used to being Romeo, so the king could be Juliet. “But if Juliet’s such a young gal, duke, my peeled head and my white whiskers is goin’ to look oncommon odd on her, maybe.” “No, don’t you worry; these country jakes won’t ever think of that. Besides, you know, you’ll be in costume, and that makes all the difference in the world; Juliet’s in a balcony, enjoying the moonlight before she goes to bed, and she’s got on her night-gown and her ruffled nightcap. Here are the costumes for the parts.” He got out two or three curtain-calico suits, which he said was meedyevil armor for Richard III. and t’other chap, and a long white cotton nightshirt and a ruffled nightcap to match. The king was satisfied; so the duke got out his book and read the parts over in the most splendid spread-eagle way, prancing around and acting at the same time, to show how it had got to be done; then he give the book to the king and told him to get his part by heart. There was a little one-horse town about three mile down the bend, and after dinner the duke said he had ciphered out his idea about how to run in daylight without it being dangersome for Jim; so he allowed he would go down to the town and fix that thing. The king allowed he would go, too, and see if he couldn’t strike something. We was out of coffee, so Jim said I better go along with them in the canoe and get some. When we got there there warn’t nobody stirring; streets empty, and perfectly dead and still, like Sunday. We found a sick nigger sunning himself in a back yard, and he said everybody that warn’t too young or too sick or too old was gone to camp-meeting, about two mile back in the woods. The king got the directions, and allowed he’d go and work that camp-meeting for all it was worth, and I might go, too. The duke said what he was after was a printing-office. We found it; a little bit of a concern, up over a carpenter shop—carpenters and printers all gone to the meeting, and no doors locked. It was a dirty, littered-up place, and had ink marks, and handbills with pictures of horses and runaway niggers on them, all over the walls. The duke shed his coat and said he was all right now. So me and the king lit out for the camp-meeting. We got there in about a half an hour fairly dripping, for it was a most awful hot day. There was as much as a thousand people there from twenty mile around. The woods was full of teams and wagons, hitched everywheres, feeding out of the wagon-troughs and stomping to keep off the flies. There was sheds made out of poles and roofed over with branches, where they had lemonade and gingerbread to sell, and piles of watermelons and green corn and such-like truck. The preaching was going on under the same kinds of sheds, only they was bigger and held crowds of people. The benches was made out of outside slabs of logs, with holes bored in the round side to drive sticks into for legs. They didn’t have no backs. The preachers had high platforms to stand on at one end of the sheds. The women had on sun-bonnets; and some had linsey-woolsey frocks, some gingham ones, and a few of the young ones had on calico. Some of the young men was barefooted, and some of the children didn’t have on any clothes but just a tow-linen shirt. Some of the old women was knitting, and some of the young folks was courting on the sly. The first shed we come to the preacher was lining out a hymn. He lined out two lines, everybody sung it, and it was kind of grand to hear it, there was so many of them and they done it in such a rousing way; then he lined out two more for them to sing—and so on. The people woke up more and more, and sung louder and louder; and towards the end some begun to groan, and some begun to shout. Then the preacher begun to preach, and begun in earnest, too; and went weaving first to one side of the platform and then the other, and then a-leaning down over the front of it, with his arms and his body going all the time, and shouting his words out with all his might; and every now and then he would hold up his Bible and spread it open, and kind of pass it around this way and that, shouting, “It’s the brazen serpent in the wilderness! Look upon it and live!” And people would shout out, “Glory!—A-a-men!” And so he went on, and the people groaning and crying and saying amen: “Oh, come to the mourners’ bench! come, black with sin! (Amen!) come, sick and sore! (Amen!) come, lame and halt and blind! (Amen!) come, pore and needy, sunk in shame! (A-A-Men!) come, all that’s worn and soiled and suffering!—come with a broken spirit! come with a contrite heart! come in your rags and sin and dirt! the waters that cleanse is free, the door of heaven stands open—oh, enter in and be at rest!” (A-A-Men! Glory, Glory Hallelujah!) And so on. You couldn’t make out what the preacher said any more, on account of the shouting and crying. Folks got up everywheres in the crowd, and worked their way just by main strength to the mourners’ bench, with the tears running down their faces; and when all the mourners had got up there to the front benches in a crowd, they sung and shouted and flung themselves down on the straw, just crazy and wild. Well, the first I knowed the king got a-going, and you could hear him over everybody; and next he went a-charging up on to the platform, and the preacher he begged him to speak to the people, and he done it. He told them he was a pirate—been a pirate for thirty years out in the Indian Ocean—and his crew was thinned out considerable last spring in a fight, and he was home now to take out some fresh men, and thanks to goodness he’d been robbed last night and put ashore off of a steamboat without a cent, and he was glad of it; it was the blessedest thing that ever happened to him, because he was a changed man now, and happy for the first time in his life; and, poor as he was, he was going to start right off and work his way back to the Indian Ocean, and put in the rest of his life trying to turn the pirates into the true path; for he could do it better than anybody else, being acquainted with all pirate crews in that ocean; and though it would take him a long time to get there without money, he would get there anyway, and every time he convinced a pirate he would say to him, “Don’t you thank me, don’t you give me no credit; it all belongs to them dear people in Pokeville camp-meeting, natural brothers and benefactors of the race, and that dear preacher there, the truest friend a pirate ever had!” And then he busted into tears, and so did everybody. Then somebody sings out, “Take up a collection for him, take up a collection!” Well, a half a dozen made a jump to do it, but somebody sings out, “Let him pass the hat around!” Then everybody said it, the preacher too. So the king went all through the crowd with his hat swabbing his eyes, and blessing the people and praising them and thanking them for being so good to the poor pirates away off there; and every little while the prettiest kind of girls, with the tears running down their cheeks, would up and ask him would he let them kiss him for to remember him by; and he always done it; and some of them he hugged and kissed as many as five or six times—and he was invited to stay a week; and everybody wanted him to live in their houses, and said they’d think it was an honor; but he said as this was the last day of the camp-meeting he couldn’t do no good, and besides he was in a sweat to get to the Indian Ocean right off and go to work on the pirates. When we got back to the raft and he come to count up he found he had collected eighty-seven dollars and seventy-five cents. And then he had fetched away a three-gallon jug of whisky, too, that he found under a wagon when he was starting home through the woods. The king said, take it all around, it laid over any day he’d ever put in in the missionarying line. He said it warn’t no use talking, heathens don’t amount to shucks alongside of pirates to work a camp-meeting with. The duke was thinking he’d been doing pretty well till the king come to show up, but after that he didn’t think so so much. He had set up and printed off two little jobs for farmers in that printing-office—horse bills—and took the money, four dollars. And he had got in ten dollars’ worth of advertisements for the paper, which he said he would put in for four dollars if they would pay in advance—so they done it. The price of the paper was two dollars a year, but he took in three subscriptions for half a dollar apiece on condition of them paying him in advance; they were going to pay in cordwood and onions as usual, but he said he had just bought the concern and knocked down the price as low as he could afford it, and was going to run it for cash. He set up a little piece of poetry, which he made, himself, out of his own head—three verses—kind of sweet and saddish—the name of it was, “Yes, crush, cold world, this breaking heart”—and he left that all set up and ready to print in the paper, and didn’t charge nothing for it. Well, he took in nine dollars and a half, and said he’d done a pretty square day’s work for it. Then he showed us another little job he’d printed and hadn’t charged for, because it was for us. It had a picture of a runaway nigger with a bundle on a stick over his shoulder, and “$200 reward” under it. The reading was all about Jim, and just described him to a dot. It said he run away from St. Jacques’ plantation, forty mile below New Orleans, last winter, and likely went north, and whoever would catch him and send him back he could have the reward and expenses. “Now,” says the duke, “after to-night we can run in the daytime if we want to. Whenever we see anybody coming we can tie Jim hand and foot with a rope, and lay him in the wigwam and show this handbill and say we captured him up the river, and were too poor to travel on a steamboat, so we got this little raft on credit from our friends and are going down to get the reward. Handcuffs and chains would look still better on Jim, but it wouldn’t go well with the story of us being so poor. Too much like jewelry. Ropes are the correct thing—we must preserve the unities, as we say on the boards.” We all said the duke was pretty smart, and there couldn’t be no trouble about running daytimes. We judged we could make miles enough that night to get out of the reach of the powwow we reckoned the duke’s work in the printing office was going to make in that little town; then we could boom right along if we wanted to. We laid low and kept still, and never shoved out till nearly ten o’clock; then we slid by, pretty wide away from the town, and didn’t hoist our lantern till we was clear out of sight of it. When Jim called me to take the watch at four in the morning, he says: “Huck, does you reck’n we gwyne to run acrost any mo’ kings on dis trip?” “No,” I says, “I reckon not.” “Well,” says he, “dat’s all right, den. I doan’ mine one er two kings, but dat’s enough. Dis one’s powerful drunk, en de duke ain’ much better.” I found Jim had been trying to get him to talk French, so he could hear what it was like; but he said he had been in this country so long, and had so much trouble, he’d forgot it. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved April 2022 from h Twain, Mark,1993. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. ttps://www.gutenberg.org/files/76/76-h/76-h.htm#c20 This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at , located at . www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html Photo by on Jp Valery Unsplash

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Chapter XX

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) is part of HackerNoon’s Book Blog Post series. You can jump to any chapter in this book . here CHAPTER XIX. Two or three days and nights went by; I reckon I might say they swum by, they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely. Here is the way we put in the time. It was a monstrous big river down there—sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights, and laid up and hid daytimes; soon as night was most gone we stopped navigating and tied up—nearly always in the dead water under a towhead; and then cut young cottonwoods and willows, and hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywheres—perfectly still—just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs a-cluttering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods on t’other side; you couldn’t make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up away off, and warn’t black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along ever so far away—trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks—rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by and by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there’s a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t’other side of the river, being a woodyard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh and sweet to smell on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they’ve left dead fish laying around, gars and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you’ve got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it! A little smoke couldn’t be noticed now, so we would take some fish off of the lines and cook up a hot breakfast. And afterwards we would watch the lonesomeness of the river, and kind of lazy along, and by and by lazy off to sleep. Wake up by and by, and look to see what done it, and maybe see a steamboat coughing along up-stream, so far off towards the other side you couldn’t tell nothing about her only whether she was a stern-wheel or side-wheel; then for about an hour there wouldn’t be nothing to hear nor nothing to see—just solid lonesomeness. Next you’d see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping, because they’re most always doing it on a raft; you’d see the axe flash and come down—you don’t hear nothing; you see that axe go up again, and by the time it’s above the man’s head then you hear the k’chunk!—it had took all that time to come over the water. So we would put in the day, lazying around, listening to the stillness. Once there was a thick fog, and the rafts and things that went by was beating tin pans so the steamboats wouldn’t run over them. A scow or a raft went by so close we could hear them talking and cussing and laughing—heard them plain; but we couldn’t see no sign of them; it made you feel crawly; it was like spirits carrying on that way in the air. Jim said he believed it was spirits; but I says: “No; spirits wouldn’t say, ‘Dern the dern fog.’” Soon as it was night out we shoved; when we got her out to about the middle we let her alone, and let her float wherever the current wanted her to; then we lit the pipes, and dangled our legs in the water, and talked about all kinds of things—we was always naked, day and night, whenever the mosquitoes would let us—the new clothes Buck’s folks made for me was too good to be comfortable, and besides I didn’t go much on clothes, nohow. Sometimes we’d have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark—which was a candle in a cabin window; and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two—on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could a laid them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn’t say nothing against it, because I’ve seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed they’d got spoiled and was hove out of the nest. Once or twice of a night we would see a steamboat slipping along in the dark, and now and then she would belch a whole world of sparks up out of her chimbleys, and they would rain down in the river and look awful pretty; then she would turn a corner and her lights would wink out and her powwow shut off and leave the river still again; and by and by her waves would get to us, a long time after she was gone, and joggle the raft a bit, and after that you wouldn’t hear nothing for you couldn’t tell how long, except maybe frogs or something. After midnight the people on shore went to bed, and then for two or three hours the shores was black—no more sparks in the cabin windows. These sparks was our clock—the first one that showed again meant morning was coming, so we hunted a place to hide and tie up right away. One morning about daybreak I found a canoe and crossed over a chute to the main shore—it was only two hundred yards—and paddled about a mile up a crick amongst the cypress woods, to see if I couldn’t get some berries. Just as I was passing a place where a kind of a cowpath crossed the crick, here comes a couple of men tearing up the path as tight as they could foot it. I thought I was a goner, for whenever anybody was after anybody I judged it was me—or maybe Jim. I was about to dig out from there in a hurry, but they was pretty close to me then, and sung out and begged me to save their lives—said they hadn’t been doing nothing, and was being chased for it—said there was men and dogs a-coming. They wanted to jump right in, but I says: “Don’t you do it. I don’t hear the dogs and horses yet; you’ve got time to crowd through the brush and get up the crick a little ways; then you take to the water and wade down to me and get in—that’ll throw the dogs off the scent.” They done it, and soon as they was aboard I lit out for our towhead, and in about five or ten minutes we heard the dogs and the men away off, shouting. We heard them come along towards the crick, but couldn’t see them; they seemed to stop and fool around a while; then, as we got further and further away all the time, we couldn’t hardly hear them at all; by the time we had left a mile of woods behind us and struck the river, everything was quiet, and we paddled over to the towhead and hid in the cottonwoods and was safe. One of these fellows was about seventy or upwards, and had a bald head and very gray whiskers. He had an old battered-up slouch hat on, and a greasy blue woollen shirt, and ragged old blue jeans britches stuffed into his boot-tops, and home-knit galluses—no, he only had one. He had an old long-tailed blue jeans coat with slick brass buttons flung over his arm, and both of them had big, fat, ratty-looking carpet-bags. The other fellow was about thirty, and dressed about as ornery. After breakfast we all laid off and talked, and the first thing that come out was that these chaps didn’t know one another. “What got you into trouble?” says the baldhead to t’other chap. “Well, I’d been selling an article to take the tartar off the teeth—and it does take it off, too, and generly the enamel along with it—but I stayed about one night longer than I ought to, and was just in the act of sliding out when I ran across you on the trail this side of town, and you told me they were coming, and begged me to help you to get off. So I told you I was expecting trouble myself, and would scatter out with you. That’s the whole yarn—what’s yourn? “Well, I’d ben a-running’ a little temperance revival thar ’bout a week, and was the pet of the women folks, big and little, for I was makin’ it mighty warm for the rummies, I tell you, and takin’ as much as five or six dollars a night—ten cents a head, children and niggers free—and business a-growin’ all the time, when somehow or another a little report got around last night that I had a way of puttin’ in my time with a private jug on the sly. A nigger rousted me out this mornin’, and told me the people was getherin’ on the quiet with their dogs and horses, and they’d be along pretty soon and give me ’bout half an hour’s start, and then run me down if they could; and if they got me they’d tar and feather me and ride me on a rail, sure. I didn’t wait for no breakfast—I warn’t hungry.” “Old man,” said the young one, “I reckon we might double-team it together; what do you think?” “I ain’t undisposed. What’s your line—mainly?” “Jour printer by trade; do a little in patent medicines; theater-actor—tragedy, you know; take a turn to mesmerism and phrenology when there’s a chance; teach singing-geography school for a change; sling a lecture sometimes—oh, I do lots of things—most anything that comes handy, so it ain’t work. What’s your lay?” “I’ve done considerble in the doctoring way in my time. Layin’ on o’ hands is my best holt—for cancer and paralysis, and sich things; and I k’n tell a fortune pretty good when I’ve got somebody along to find out the facts for me. Preachin’s my line, too, and workin’ camp-meetin’s, and missionaryin’ around.” Nobody never said anything for a while; then the young man hove a sigh and says: “Alas!” “What ’re you alassin’ about?” says the bald-head. “To think I should have lived to be leading such a life, and be degraded down into such company.” And he begun to wipe the corner of his eye with a rag. “Dern your skin, ain’t the company good enough for you?” says the baldhead, pretty pert and uppish. “Yes, it is good enough for me; it’s as good as I deserve; for who fetched me so low when I was so high? I did myself. I don’t blame you, gentlemen—far from it; I don’t blame anybody. I deserve it all. Let the cold world do its worst; one thing I know—there’s a grave somewhere for me. The world may go on just as it’s always done, and take everything from me—loved ones, property, everything; but it can’t take that. Some day I’ll lie down in it and forget it all, and my poor broken heart will be at rest.” He went on a-wiping. “Drot your pore broken heart,” says the baldhead; “what are you heaving your pore broken heart at us f’r? we hain’t done nothing.” “No, I know you haven’t. I ain’t blaming you, gentlemen. I brought myself down—yes, I did it myself. It’s right I should suffer—perfectly right—I don’t make any moan.” “Brought you down from whar? Whar was you brought down from?” “Ah, you would not believe me; the world never believes—let it pass—’tis no matter. The secret of my birth—” “The secret of your birth! Do you mean to say—” “Gentlemen,” says the young man, very solemn, “I will reveal it to you, for I feel I may have confidence in you. By rights I am a duke!” Jim’s eyes bugged out when he heard that; and I reckon mine did, too. Then the baldhead says: “No! you can’t mean it?” “Yes. My great-grandfather, eldest son of the Duke of Bridgewater, fled to this country about the end of the last century, to breathe the pure air of freedom; married here, and died, leaving a son, his own father dying about the same time. The second son of the late duke seized the titles and estates—the infant real duke was ignored. I am the lineal descendant of that infant—I am the rightful Duke of Bridgewater; and here am I, forlorn, torn from my high estate, hunted of men, despised by the cold world, ragged, worn, heart-broken, and degraded to the companionship of felons on a raft!” Jim pitied him ever so much, and so did I. We tried to comfort him, but he said it warn’t much use, he couldn’t be much comforted; said if we was a mind to acknowledge him, that would do him more good than most anything else; so we said we would, if he would tell us how. He said we ought to bow when we spoke to him, and say “Your Grace,” or “My Lord,” or “Your Lordship”—and he wouldn’t mind it if we called him plain “Bridgewater,” which, he said, was a title anyway, and not a name; and one of us ought to wait on him at dinner, and do any little thing for him he wanted done. Well, that was all easy, so we done it. All through dinner Jim stood around and waited on him, and says, “Will yo’ Grace have some o’ dis or some o’ dat?” and so on, and a body could see it was mighty pleasing to him. But the old man got pretty silent by and by—didn’t have much to say, and didn’t look pretty comfortable over all that petting that was going on around that duke. He seemed to have something on his mind. So, along in the afternoon, he says: “Looky here, Bilgewater,” he says, “I’m nation sorry for you, but you ain’t the only person that’s had troubles like that.” “No?” “No you ain’t. You ain’t the only person that’s ben snaked down wrongfully out’n a high place.” “Alas!” “No, you ain’t the only person that’s had a secret of his birth.” And, by jings, he begins to cry. “Hold! What do you mean?” “Bilgewater, kin I trust you?” says the old man, still sort of sobbing. “To the bitter death!” He took the old man by the hand and squeezed it, and says, “That secret of your being: speak!” “Bilgewater, I am the late Dauphin!” You bet you, Jim and me stared this time. Then the duke says: “You are what?” “Yes, my friend, it is too true—your eyes is lookin’ at this very moment on the pore disappeared Dauphin, Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy the Sixteen and Marry Antonette.” “You! At your age! No! You mean you’re the late Charlemagne; you must be six or seven hundred years old, at the very least.” “Trouble has done it, Bilgewater, trouble has done it; trouble has brung these gray hairs and this premature balditude. Yes, gentlemen, you see before you, in blue jeans and misery, the wanderin’, exiled, trampled-on, and sufferin’ rightful King of France.” Well, he cried and took on so that me and Jim didn’t know hardly what to do, we was so sorry—and so glad and proud we’d got him with us, too. So we set in, like we done before with the duke, and tried to comfort him. But he said it warn’t no use, nothing but to be dead and done with it all could do him any good; though he said it often made him feel easier and better for a while if people treated him according to his rights, and got down on one knee to speak to him, and always called him “Your Majesty,” and waited on him first at meals, and didn’t set down in his presence till he asked them. So Jim and me set to majestying him, and doing this and that and t’other for him, and standing up till he told us we might set down. This done him heaps of good, and so he got cheerful and comfortable. But the duke kind of soured on him, and didn’t look a bit satisfied with the way things was going; still, the king acted real friendly towards him, and said the duke’s great-grandfather and all the other Dukes of Bilgewater was a good deal thought of by his father, and was allowed to come to the palace considerable; but the duke stayed huffy a good while, till by and by the king says: “Like as not we got to be together a blamed long time on this h-yer raft, Bilgewater, and so what’s the use o’ your bein’ sour? It ’ll only make things oncomfortable. It ain’t my fault I warn’t born a duke, it ain’t your fault you warn’t born a king—so what’s the use to worry? Make the best o’ things the way you find ’em, says I—that’s my motto. This ain’t no bad thing that we’ve struck here—plenty grub and an easy life—come, give us your hand, duke, and le’s all be friends.” The duke done it, and Jim and me was pretty glad to see it. It took away all the uncomfortableness and we felt mighty good over it, because it would a been a miserable business to have any unfriendliness on the raft; for what you want, above all things, on a raft, is for everybody to be satisfied, and feel right and kind towards the others. It didn’t take me long to make up my mind that these liars warn’t no kings nor dukes at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds. But I never said nothing, never let on; kept it to myself; it’s the best way; then you don’t have no quarrels, and don’t get into no trouble. If they wanted us to call them kings and dukes, I hadn’t no objections, ’long as it would keep peace in the family; and it warn’t no use to tell Jim, so I didn’t tell him. If I never learnt nothing else out of pap, I learnt that the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let them have their own way. About HackerNoon Book Series: We bring you the most important technical, scientific, and insightful public domain books. This book is part of the public domain. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved April 2022 from Twain, Mark,1993. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7370/7370-h/7370-h.htm This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at , located at . www.gutenberg.org https://www.gutenberg.org/policy/license.html Photo by on Markus Spiske Unsplash

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: Chapter XIX

As told by the second youngest attendee of the 2017 Riot Games’ Hackathon It’s been almost three months since 50-ish other attendees from around the world and myself were selected to attend the Riot Games . I applied on a whim, thinking it would be cool to make something, like any other hackathon. Little did I know, this experience would become one of the highlights of my 2017 year. Hackathon I had never been to a local hackathon alone before, let alone one in Los Angeles. I went back and forth several times trying to decide whether to go, simulating worst case scenarios. What if I can’t find a team? What if I get lost in the airport? What if I can’t contribute to any projects? What if I can’t make friends with the other participants? I felt as though I had been thrust into my first hackathon again as my introverted tendencies took over my thoughts. Luckily, the community Discord was very welcoming. Despite this, it was difficult to initiate conversation with people I had never met before, and had been in the League of Legends developer community together for years. I had always been more of a casual player, preferring to stay within my group of friends and duo-queueing with people I knew in real life. Although I took interest in many projects, I still was unable to see how I could contribute, seeing that there were many other developers much more talented than myself. Crossing my fingers, I only prayed that I would meet people to work with at the event. Day 0: Arrival Fast forward to the night before my flight. I had gotten back from Pittsburgh a couple weeks before, and navigated San Francisco International Airport (SFO) for the first time on my own. I rushed to the airport following an academic test, and my stomach began to flutter as I embraced a combination of both excitement and nervousness. My mother followed me to my plane, and I gave her a last embrace before I boarded the plane. It was a quick 1-hour flight to LA, where I caught a couple zzz’s. As I stepped off the plane into LAX, I tried to find my glasses and froze. The realization that I had forgotten them at home suddenly struck home, and I began to panic. I had heard tales of LAX being notoriously difficult to navigate, but headed for the nearest readable sign, hoping that I was walking in the right direction. My face flushed red as I stepped onto an elevator, but nearly stepped off on the wrong floor. Feeling lost, I messaged the Discord, “Uh oh, I’m lost or something.” I was directed to look for a sign with my name on it, but I only saw my middle name. Being the extremely self-conscious person I am, I pranced back and forth before shuffling up to the limo driver and asking, “Is this for Emily Yu?” With that simple phrase, I overcame my first predicament and arrived at the hotel, Marriott Courtyard. Later that night, a group of us that had arrived a day early went out to explore the Pier and head out to get dinner at Bubba Gump Shrimp. A group of us exploring the pier the day before the hackathon started Day 1: Team Formation and Hackathon Start My hackathon experience began with a bang, as prior to arriving I had anticipated the same experience as hotels in Asia, and realized the night before that I had forgotten many essentials. Among these items lay toothpaste, slippers, hair ties, and also pajamas (but I didn’t realize that toothpaste was provided from the front desk). As a result, I rose early, hoping to make a leisurely walk to the nearest Walgreens a mile or so away. This decision proved to be an unlucky one, as I was equipped with uncomfortable shoes and a terrible sense of directions. Even with the assistance of Google Maps I ended up walking in a circle for about twenty minutes, and to make it back in time for the shuttle to Riot HQ, I had to sprint without a hair tie. For those who do not have long hair, this is something unpleasant. Imagine sprinting in 80 degree heat, wearing excessive clothing and a couple necklaces or lanyards. Definitely not an ideal running environment, and to make things worse, I hadn’t run in ages! very After finally making it back with a burnt cheek and sore heels, I barely scrambled up to my hotel room and made it back down in time for the shuttle pickup. Throwback to my impromptu Walgreens run I had come into the hackathon with an idea that was frankly way out of my League — haha, get it? However, following the orientation event, I was left wandering around, realizing that most people had already found a team. After meandering around with one other person interested in my idea, we both decided to merge into another group, who happened to be the team that I would stick with for the rest of the event. As we gathered around a table, I stared in confusion as the team scribbled a plan down on the nearest piece of paper. With a very light understanding of what was going on, I volunteered to work on part of the backend, since I had spent a lot of time as a frontend developer in previous hackathons. Sorry if you’re reading this guys, I was confused for a pretty darn long time. I had come in with a light knowledge of JS, which happened to be what we built our project, League Voice, with. League Voice stemmed from the fact that beginner and low-elo players tend to lose track of stats and champion profile that makes gameplay much easier, such as spell cooldowns (for both themselves and opponents) as well as what other champions’ abilities are. We thought that a Google Voice assistant would be the best platform to make referencing information easy, since you would not need to tab out and interrupt your . game Because our team was so large, our main focus ended up being to cover the greatest amount of features possible — yet we still ended up running out of ideas closer to the end of the hackathon. The following are just a couple of the many that were implemented, so feel free to register your summoner at our and keep up with us at our and ! demo website Discord GitHub : “I’m playing mid. Who should I play?” Champion suggestions : “Give me an item suggestion.” Item suggestions : “Give me some advice.” Game advice : “Annie just flashed. When is Annie’s flash up?” Summoner Spell Cooldowns : “What is Annie’s passive?” Static Data : “Remind me not to pick into Annie” Write or Read Notes A demo of our project, League Voice. The team headed off to the cafeteria for lunch, and I headed for the salad bar, avoiding the long line for warm food. I had felt bloated before coming to the hackathon, so it was a win-win situation. As a result, I would spend the next three days eating variations of the same salad, and would come back with a new preferred diet. Every day around dinner, attendees headed over to Riot’s PC bang, which glowed red and purple as we gazed in excitement at the gaming cubicles that encompassed the room. Settling down, we hopped on Discord and played a couple games of League of Legends, where I marveled at the difference of playing using a Wacom tablet versus using a mouse (but that’s a story for another time). As we finished our session with a triumphant win, we headed back to the room and continued working on our project, and around 11:30 PM, a couple team members and I hopped on a bus and left for the hotel, anticipating the sleepless nights that lay ahead. The splendor of Riot HQ’s PC Bang in full view Day 2: Riot HQ Tour As the day went on, we spent our time making new functions and improving our project. We were given a tour of the facility in two groups, but photography was limited. The whole facility was amazingly designed, soI highly encourage taking a visit. There were many little intricacies that were implemented into the building structure that embodied the employees’ passion for League of Legends. LCS Studio and Bilgewater Bar Thresh and the Pocket Picks Studio Lucian, Annie (and Tibbers), and Ziggs By the end of the day, I had finished up a couple more features, and spent my time trying to correlate game time versus win rate, but unfortunately struggled to implement it. I headed back to the hotel late at night, thinking that my room would be an ideal working environment, but ended up falling asleep a couple hours before the shuttle back. Day 3: Demo Day As the code freeze deadline approached, excitement and tension filled the air. Our projects were demoed in an exposition-type presentation, and checked out everyone’s projects. Chan and Jake demo League Voice for Querjin Runeterra: The Election Using their combined cinematic and art skills, they made a game that would determine what region of Runeterra you would be associated with the closest, based on your summoner profile. Parallel Convergence: GitHub While watching games, people will often offer advice on how they could improve. Parallel Convergence allows real-time annotation on game replays, allowing professional coaches to instruct players with ease. Lobby Links When inviting friends to play a game of League, it’s sometimes difficult to know if a 5-man stack is already full, oftentimes leading to summoners logging in just to find that they cannot play. Lobby Links keeps an updated party count and allows players to invite others through a Discord invite link, allowing players to easily invite their friends to play. Couch Potato Many people enjoy watching esports together, which for the most part, happens over Discord or Skype. They shifted the experience to virtual reality, allowing players to watch esports together in a virtual environment while being given a virtual representation of the current game stats. Liam demonstrates how his team’s project Couch Potato works to a Rioter Combo Practicer Summoners often go into a custom game just to practice cs mechanics or figure out how to play a new champion. This plugin allows a players to practice their combos on an actual target, recording the levels of damage, tracking the timing of combos, and giving prompts for different ways to do so. Alexa Helper Application This application was similar to our own, League Voice. It gave insights on player ability and helped a player improve their play. Blitzcrank Coach Summoners often compare themselves to the pros while trying to figure out how to improve. This web application picks out a summoner’s weak points and gives advice on how to improve. Build Sharer Application A more personalized alternative for Mobafire or Probuilds, this web application allows you to generate your own hot links for created builds and skill sequences, allowing players to easily share information regarding their playstyle. Shopkeeper: GitHub This virtual reality game helped improve player’s knowledge of champion builds by giving a time limit on incoming “customers” who desired items. Kevin demos Shopkeeper, equipped with a full virtual reality headset I couldn’t find all the projects on GitHub, but I’ve linked a couple of them! If I forgot a project, messed up the name, or you would like to give a more thorough description, drop me a note and I’ll correct my mistakes. Also, shoutout to new project, DeepLeague! Farza’s DeepLeague — leveraging computer vision and deep learning on the League of Legends mini map + a dataset of over 100,000 labeled images to further A.I research within esports. You can check out his project’s GitHub out and read more about it ! here here Following the event, despite our exhaustion, we head over to the PC bang again to wind down and relax. As we left Riot, I was hit with a wave of both sadness and sleepiness, but our group decided it would be fun to explore Santa Monica more before we left. Through sneaking into a jacuzzi to playing Ghost (a mafia-like word game), exploring a bookstore, and raiding YogurtLand, we enjoyed our last moments before heading off to bed for home. Reflection As I arrived home, I was in the reflection phase already, and was recalling my experiences and telling my family how glad I was that I decided to go, and basically everything that happened. Throwback to this beautiful sunset view from the Pier I had never had that much self-reliance or self-rule. In other hackathons, when I went with my super dependable friends, I always fall back on them if I became scared or uncomfortable, so I always had a lot of fun and never experienced a push on my self-imposed boundaries. However, I always felt like I was missing something; I rarely met new people and mostly stayed close to the people I knew. That gap was filled when I experienced a of new experiences this time around, mostly because of my lack of self-dependency. ton Speaking up for yourself can save hours of time. As I mentioned earlier, I spent some time trying to figure out what I was supposed to be doing, trying to mask my confusion and appear how I wanted to portray myself. However, if I had instead asked more questions during the planning phase, I would not have had to spend that first couple hours being confused about how we were to integrate the Firebase functions with Google Voice, nor would I have had to think doubt my competence during the hackathon. People aren’t scary, and there’s no reason to be scared of approaching people. For the most part, a lot of people probably felt the same way as I did, probably sharing some of the same introverted tendencies that gave them similar experiences as myself. By no means does this represent the majority of hackathon attendees, but it is still makes up a prevalent personality type that cannot be ignored. After the first night of socializing, I unintentionally closed off, spending most of my time with my hackathon group. However, a lot of new people arrived the morning after, and because I made my run to Walgreens I did not have time to spend the time and meet the new arrivals. As a result, during the exposition, I spent most of the time wandering around and checking out others’ projects without ever have really formally introduced myself. However, I found that our post-hackathon group gave me a way to meet the rest of the developers, and so it all turned out well. In a different perspective, as a fellow hackathon organizer, I think that Riot’s Hackathon was splendidly put together. and the rest of the crew did a great job making sure that we always knew what was going on, even when I gave my false alarm of being lost. It is, of course, a given that a company hackathon would be different from a school or university hackathon, since there are likely very different requirements to fulfill, in regards to food catering and funding. Regardless, the whole event progressed very smoothly, with little to no hiccups during the event. Gene All the attendees and the organizing crew gathered together for a post-hackathon group photo. In the end, attending Riot’s hackathon was both a truly mentally and intellectually rewarding experience, and came out knowing people from all over the world: Germany, the United Kingdom, and even Japan. I hope that in the future, we can all reunite in the future and build more amazing projects at Riot Games again. If you enjoyed hearing about my hackathon experience, please leave a 👏 and go play some League of Legends!

My First Experience Attending a Hackathon Alone at Riot Games

I have watched and re-watched Seinfeld over and over for the last 6–7 years now and it remains, till date, one of my most favorite shows. For a show that claims to be about nothing, it has certainly managed to fill up nine seasons worth of content, all with seemingly no plot. The show, if you’re unfamiliar with it, traces the day-to-day lives of (mainly) 4 quite unremarkable people — Jerry Seinfeld, George Costanza, Cosmo Kramer and Elaine Benes. These 4, along with plenty of other side characters and guest stars engage in what seems to be a series of meaningless conversations and activities, which somehow all come together towards the end of the duration of each episode. Yesterday while animatedly watching one of the episodes in which Frank Costanza talks about the a festival he had created, “Festivus”, I found myself thinking how much I adored Frank Costanza as a character. But he hadn’t featured in many episodes right? Neither had Jackie Chiles, the versatile lawyer, and yet he’d had the same effect as had Frank. Which episodes were those again? Damn. You’d thinking having watched this show so many times, such information would be “tattooed in my brain”. But admittedly, it was not. And there Had to be a more complicated, yet fun way to get this information than looking it up on Wikipedia. And thus, the weekend data-dive game was on. The measure used in this analysis is the number of times a person has a line to speak per episode. So it follows that the first time a person (say Jackie Chiles) had a line throughout the show would be the first time he/she was featured. Other results that followed were how important a character was to the show or an episode, or in how many episodes was say, Elaine or Kramer, not present. Also, we know the central 4 characters, but how do the 3 characters apart from Jerry rank against each other? So, this is how I went about it. Scraping and parsing the data. I obtained the list of episodes and scraped every episode’s script off of seinfeldscripts.com <Hat-tip> using Requests at a consistent rate so as to not overwhelm them, even if it was just around 200 automated API calls. This website also has the listing of all episodes with the episode numbers from 1–180 alongside it.[1] The data scraped was neither very manageable nor consistent in the form obtained. So a pattern was slightly troublesome to derive, but finally I found a way to just get the dialogues and more importantly, the person who delivered them using Beautiful Soup (bs4). soup = BeautifulSoup(req.content, ‘html.parser’)paragraphs = soup.find_all('p') ... if (j.isupper() and len(j)>1 and ‘:’ in j):if j in chars_dict:chars_dict[j]=chars_dict[j]+1chars_dict[‘TOTAL’]=chars_dict[‘TOTAL’]+1else:chars_dict[j]=1chars_dict[‘TOTAL’]=chars_dict[‘TOTAL’]+1 In case it was a well written script, the pattern would be something like - KRAMER: “Hoochiemama!” And the above mentioned code snippet would handle. But in many of the files you had entries like George: “Vandelay Industries! Say Vandelay Industries” And the only indication here that a dialogue has begun is the colon (“:”). So this was the other case to handle. Storing and filtering the data Looping through the entire set of scripts resulted in a dictionary of dictionaries, where the key was an episode number and the value was a dictionary of the cast for that episode with their corresponding counts of dialogues. Next I consider the characters I’m primarily interested in, since for this usecase, I don’t really care about some people like or Stan the Caddy. Sue Ellen Mischke characters =[“JERRY”,”GEORGE”,”ELAINE”,”SUSAN”,”KRAMER”,”JACKIE”,”FRANK”,”RAVA”,”NEWMAN”,”TOTAL”] After translating the keys of the dictionary obtained in Step 3 to uniformly be in upper case, I store the occurrence values per episode for the characters mentioned above along with the total number of dialogues per episode (“TOTAL”) in a dataframe since Pandas is a very good tool to manipulate data.The occurrence values were then normalized to be in percentages of the TOTAL. Despite all the attempts to obtain complete data, there were some files i.e. episode scripts that were able to be only partially processed or were unable to be processed because there was no way to distinguish beyond a shadow of the doubt between the character names and the dialogues themselves. This was obviously because the only source considered was Seinfeldscripts.com. A future experiment will probably consider other sources to fill in the missing data. To this end, I’ve filtered out entries that had a TOTAL value < 100 df = df[df.TOTAL > 100].sort_values(by=”episode_num”) The finale episodes have also been omitted from this analysis. Results: The main result was a set of graphs based on the following criteria I chose -a) % of dialogues per episode of Elaine vs Kramerb) % of dialogues per episode of Elaine vs Georgec) % of dialogues per episode of George vs Kramerd) Episodes in which Frank Costanza featured e) Episodes in which Susan featuredf) Episodes in which Jackie Chiles featuredg) Episodes in which Newman featured Other miscellaneous graphs were also computed. The X-axis for all graphs shows the episode number (albeit unclear) and the Y-axis tracks the % occupied per episode. All characters Understandably, Jerry has the largest number of dialogues in every episode. a) : Elaine vs George ELAINE BENES vs GEORGE COSTANZA The trend shows that George (~20–30%) always has more screen space than Elaine(~5–25%) . b) Elaine vs Kramer : ELAINE BENES vs COSMO KRAMER While they seem to be uniformly matched for the most part, it looks like Elaine almost always has more to say than Kramer, atleast for the first 60% of the total number of episodes. Towards the end however, Kramer seems to be having more to say. c) George vs Kramer: GEORGE COSTANZA vs COSMO KRAMER No surprises here. George dominates with ~20–30% of the conversations while Kramer averages out at close to 15% of the conversations. So, we see that in terms of main character importance, Jerry > George > (Elaine = Kramer). Moving on, d) Frank Costanza: FRANK COSTANZA Frank Costanza first appears in episode 62 — “The Handicap Spot” and finally in episode 166 — “The Strike” (the legendary Festivus episode) barring the finale episodes. e) Susan Ross SUSAN ROSS Susan first appears in episode 43 — “The Pitch” and finally in episode 134 — “The Invitations”, when… you know.. f) Jackie Chiles JACKIE CHILES Jackie Chiles plays a major role in only 3 episodes Episodes 113, 122 and 143, again barring the Finale. I finally have my answer :D g) Newman We see that Newman plays a key role in more episodes than any of the other side characters, going upto 14% in episode 132 — The Bottle Deposits — part 2 where he runs a bottle scam with Kramer (Aah nostalgia). This experiment was a lot of fun. I hope to fill in the blanks in the next ones and also work out stats and relationships for the other characters. SERENITY NOW!!!! [1] : http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/seinfeld-scripts.html Code https://github.com/abhiii5459/DataViz/blob/master/Seinfeld/Seinfeld_Analysis.ipynb

Studying the show about nothing

Alright. Round 2 . FIGHT! So, the last time, I figured out, unintentionally, at what times of the day most of my posts happened. This time, I again unintentionally got results different from what I set out to do — I’ll get to this eventually I guess, but for now, the objective is obtaining a measure of the number of posts I make per day and thereby see if I can figure out which days of the week have been the most (least?) productive. Of course, this is still a step away from my eventual goal (hopefully Experiment 3 should sort it out). Let’s get to the methodology — Step 1 — How do I get the data? Remember how I downloaded my entire data last time and web-scraped it using scrapy? Well, this time I API-ed my way into getting my data because for a higher level of specificity, sometimes just HTML scraping won’t do. Timestamps were easy enough to fetch from the earlier case, but here I needed date values that were hard to get from the Downloaded Data.zip file. So this data would comprise of the entire stream of my posts all the way from 2008 — when I joined FB to the 23rd of Nov, upto when I retrieved my post details. a) Get your user access token — I’m sure there’s an OAuth API way to do this, but I did this by manually generating an Access token from the Graph API explorer or Access Token Tool. The former lets you choose permissions on the access token as to what APIs you can open the token up to and also lets you see the expiry time for that token (it’s around an hour from the time of creation. This is the annoying part. Security aside, I’d have really loved a longer expiry time for the access token, but I’m sure once I figure out the API to generate the access token, I can just have my script — see below — fetch it automatically everytime it hits a 401) b) Get the APIs necessary — Given the nature of my pivot, just the feed API would have done the job for me. But I’ll be using the result of the reactions API in my next blog post, so that’s what I ended up using here as well, in conjunction with the feed API. A typical feed API call looks like this — https://graph.facebook.com/v2.5/10152460834423273/feed?limit=25&access_token=EAACEdEose0cBANI6UZBB77zEUEOpKNhxyZAuLJozw2uQ18bNIW18Qp1zxSUh6OZC0gONp3B5ZCZCZABqdqWxkg9rcvdleay0BVciZCZA46TMkYog60RZBdnwfpZAaVVMhMKgN90RLMAeJWoKk1eBydwXZAU16oZCmoCF1BpCLKK3e4kUGudMHMV11ZBPHZAobYwFUgybgZD &until=1500849601 The version number matters because there are some APIs that version-dependant. For example, the reactions API requires v2.6 or higher. The second URI parameter is the user ID that you can also get from the Graph API explorer. The third parameter — limit — is optional because the default value is 25. You can include it if you want to specify higher values i.e fetching more results per page. The fourth parameter is the access token itself obtained in Step (a) The fifth parameter — ‘until’ — is a misnomer. It actually indicates the starting datetime object from when you want to fetch the #limit posts. The response of this API is of the form : {“data” : [{“message”: “FB_Post body_1” “created_time”: “2017–11–27T12:47:50+0000” “id”: “1012460834423273_10156427233338273”},{“message”: “FB_Post body_2” “created_time”: “2017–11–27T10:47:50+0000” “id”: “1012460834423273_10156427233338273”}..25 entries ],“paging”: { “previous”: “long obnoxious link1”,“next” : “long obnoxious link2”}} I figured that the seemingly useful “next” link is rendered unnecessary if you can find out the date of the last post on that page yourself, convert it into Epoch time and use that value in the “until” parameter mentioned above. Also, in the response is an inconspicuous little “ ”. This little monster is actually an amalgamation of your and the post’s itself, resulting in another unique . This is the to use in the Reactions API that results in obtaining all the reactions for that post enumerated as one of id user_id id id id {“LIKE”, “ANGRY”, “WOW”, “HAHA”, “LOVE”} And a typical Reactions API looks like this — https://graph.facebook.com/v2.6/10152460834423273_10156395770753273/reactions?limit=25&access_token=EAACEdEose0cBANI6UZBB77zEUEOpKNhxyZAuLJozw2uQ18bNIW18Qp1zxSUh6OZC0gONp3B5ZCZCZABqdqWxkg9rcvdleay0BVciZCZA46TMkYog60RZBdnwfpZAaVVMhMKgN90RLMAeJWoKk1eBydwXZAU16oZCmoCF1BpCLKK3e4kUGudMHMV11ZBPHZAobYwFUgybgZD And the response is — { "data": [ { "id": "1022218239209614", "name": "Name1", "type": "HAHA" }, { "id": "86372147016752", "name": "Name2", "type": "WOW" }, . . ], "paging": { "cursors": { "before": "TVRVNU9EZAzBNamN5TlRveE5URXhNakEyTVRFMU9qYzRPRFkwT0RBek56a3hNek14TWc9PQZDZD", "after": "TlRjMk1EWXpNVFF6T2pFMU1URXdNekE0TmpnNk1qVTBNRGsyTVRZAeE13PT0ZD" }, "next": "https://graph.facebook.com/v2.6/10152460834423273_10156395770753273/reactions?access_token=EAACEdEose0cBANI6UZBB77zEUEOpKNhxyZAuLJozw2uQ18bNIW18Qp1zxSUh6OZC0gONp3B5ZCZCZABqdqWxkg9rcvdleay0BVciZCZA46TMkYog60RZBdnwfpZAaVVMhMKgN90RLMAeJWoKk1eBydwXZAU16oZCmoCF1BpCLKK3e4kUGudMHMV11ZBPHZAobYwFUgybgZD&pretty=1&limit=25&after=TlRjMk1EWXpNVFF6T2pFMU1URXdNekE0TmpnNk1qVTBNRGsyTVRZAeE13PT0ZD" }} Remember the good ol’ days when there was just a Like button? That’s gone now, so even the simple Like API returns only the number of “Like” reactions you got on a post. So if you wanted the number of Total reactions on your post, the above mentioned API is what you’d want. Anyway, like I mentioned earlier, to track the number of posts, I could have made do with the Feed API, but using the Feeds, followed by the Reactions API and painstakingly making API calls limiting myself to 25 each time (I didn’t want to get blocked by FB for making too many API calls — which in hindsight was foolish because every click on the website is an API call) , obtaining the last date per page and substituting that in the next API call, I ended up making a CSV of {Total Reactions per post, Date} netting upto around 4500 entries. Next I computed the number of posts per date and obtained another CSV out of that — {#of posts per date, Date}. I used for the entire process —Requests, Numpy and CSV. I used matplotlib for some test graphs as well. The IPython notebooks for the same are provided down below. Python Now the data is ready. Step 2 — Plotting all of this in a nice format Last time, I’d used a bubble chart to highlight the time of maximum usage. This time, given that it’s panning over a long period of time, I decided to use a Calendar Heatmap rendered again, using D3.JS . Now I’m aware that there are A LOT of different ways to visualise this data. But this is what I went with. I’ll play around with others soon :) For this, I used a variation of [1], extending the time period to start from Q1 of 2008 as opposed to last year as in [1]. Also, I modified some more parameters to suit my use case, in terms of the width of panning, color ranges for the map, caption etc. The result was this heatmap — a sample of it is presented below. Step 3 : Pretend this hasn’t been an enormous waste of time and try to justify what all of this potentially tells me — It’s still very much an intermediate step into my eventual goal. But what this tells me is what days of the week I’ve been most active on FB and it’s not saying much since I’ve posted continuously for the last 90 days. But the darker shades of red do indicate larger spurts of creative posts (Context — I post original content on my feed — puns, doodles ; I will not comment on the quality though, out of sheer modesty. Ah, meta irony.). It also allows me to already validate that which I know — the days when I haven’t been active on Facebook at all. The relatively large expanse of empty land in the first half of the snapshot above indicates my brief non-usage of the social networking time-waster. But I do not begrudge it. It has provided me with an avenue to practice and expand my data visualisation (and eventually, hopefully prediction) learnings. Notes, potholes, additional learnings — : I hit some parsing errors when I obtained a 401 because the I was using was due to posts by friends on my timeline. I ended up filtering calls only on my after that and validated for 200 OK status codes, only following which parsing should be done. “Not every API calls end up good. Some of them go bad” id id This study can potentially be extended to a Digital Marketing use-case where marketers can figure out when they have been most active on their page, as opposed to their profile. Practicality: Heatmaps are cool. But it would be cooler to be able to click on each segment and expand it to get more insights per day. I don’t know how to do that yet. I’ll learn and jot it here in a future experiment. Learning: What’s next? The heatmap I’ve generated and the link for which I’ve pasted below takes around 45 friggin’ seconds to load up because of the amount of data it’s loading. I need to read up on caching and loading the page to speed it up. I know I’ll figure it out eventually anway but tips from professionals would be most welcome. Hopefully, there will be no more deviations and I’ll end up actually mining and visualising “that which I originally intended”. Reference material — https://github.com/DKirwan/calendar-heatmap https://developers.facebook.com/tools-and-support/ Source code and other intermediate data — _Contribute to fb_usage development by creating an account on GitHub._github.com abhiii5459/fb_usage I’ll expand on the Readme file soon to indicate which files need to be focussed upon in case someone’s interested in contributing. Suffice to say for now that “Reactions1.ipynb”, “Postprocessing.ipynb” and the FB-FrontEnd folder are what are chiefly at play here. — (Wait for 45 seconds :-/ Hey, you wait 2 whole minutes for popcorn, don’t you?) — Seriously though, needs speed-up. Closer look at the heatmap _Edit description_cdn.rawgit.com D3.js Calendar Heatmap Thanks for reading!

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