Sawyer.' In some respects 'Pudd'nhead Wilson' is the most dramatic of
Mark Twain's longer stories, and also the most ingenious; like 'Tom
Sawyer' and 'Huckleberry Finn,' it has the full flavor of the
Mississippi River, on which its author spent his own boyhood, and from
contact with the soil of which he has always risen reinvigorated.

It is by these three stories, and especially by 'Huckleberry Finn,' that
Mark Twain is likely to live longest. Nowhere else is the life of the
Mississippi Valley so truthfully recorded. Nowhere else can we find a
gallery of southwestern characters as varied and as veracious as those
Huck Finn met in his wanderings. The histories of literature all praise
the 'Gil Blas' of Le Sage for its amusing adventures, its natural
characters, its pleasant humor, and its insight into human frailty; and
the praise is deserved. But in every one of these qualities 'Huckleberry
Finn' is superior to 'Gil Blas.' Le Sage set the model of the picaresque
novel, and Mark Twain followed his example; but the American book is
richer than the French--deeper, finer, stronger. It would be hard to
find in any language better specimens of pure narrative, better examples
of the power of telling a story and of calling up action so that the
reader cannot help but see it, than Mark Twain's account of the
Shepardson-Grangerford feud, and his description of the shooting of
Boggs by Sherbourn and of the foiled attempt to lynch Sherbourn
afterward.

These scenes, fine as they are, vivid, powerful, and most artistic in
their restraint, can be matched in the two other books. In 'Tom Sawyer'
they can be paralleled by the chapter in which the boy and the girl are
lost in the cave, and Tom, seeing a gleam of light in the distance,
discovers that it is a candle carried by Indian Joe, the one enemy he
has in the world. In 'Pudd'nhead Wilson' the great passages of