Uncle Dan'l's Apparition.
By Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner.
Whatever the lagging, dragging journey from Tennessee to Missouri may have been to the rest of the emigrants, it was a wonder and delight to the children, a world of enchantment; and they believed it to be peopled with the mysterious dwarfs and giants and goblins that figured in the tales the negro slaves were in the habit of telling them nightly by the shuddering light of the kitchen fire.
At the end of nearly a week of travel, the party went into camp near a shabby village which was caving, house by house, into the hungry Mississippi. The river astonished the children beyond measure. Its mile-breadth of water seemed an ocean to them, in the shadowy twilight, and the vague riband of trees on the further shore, the verge of a continent which surely none but them had ever seen before.
"Uncle Dan'l " (colored), aged 40; his wife, "Aunt Jinny," aged 30; "Young Miss" Emily Hawkins, "Young Mars" Washington Hawkins, and "Young Mars" Clay, the new member of the family, ranged themselves on a log, after supper, and contemplated the marvelous river and discussed it. The moon rose and sailed aloft through a maize of shredded cloud-wreaths; the somber river just perceptibly brightened under the veiled light; a deep silence pervaded the air, and was emphasized, at intervals, rather than broken, by the hooting of an owl the baying of a dog, or the muffled crash of a caving bank in the distance.
The little company assembled on the log were all children (at least in simplicity and broad and comprehensive ignorance), and the remarks they made about the river were in keeping with their character; and so awed were they by the grandeur and the solemnity of the scene before them, and by their belief that the air was filled with invisible spirits, and that the faint zephyrs were caused by their passing wings,
