Huck and Jim has just escaped the feud between the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords. Huck had just seen the dead bodies of Buck and his cousin floating in the river and he wanted to get the image out of his head as quickly as possible. With the raft floating down the river, Jim and Huck decide to relax, steal food and survive. They noticed that the shore would go black after midnight because everyone would put out their candles. They would use the sparks from the candles to tell time so during that time they came to shore and tied up their raft. Huck explored to find some berries when he saw two men being chased by dogs. He helped them avoid the dogs and soon introduced himself. One of the men was around 70, had a bald head, some grey whiskers and dressed badly. The other man was around 30 and dressed as bad as the other man. The 30 year old was selling medicine that took the tartar off of teeth, but also took the enamel off too. He over stayed his welcome and decided to slip out, but ran into the old man begging for help. The old man was running a revival that didn’t go too well. Soon after talking for a while, The young man pronounces himself as a Duke, and the old man says that he is a King! Huck doesn’t believe them, but decides to keep quiet. After traveling with them a bit, the Duke comes up with the idea of him and the kings doing the swordfight from Richard III and the Balcony Scene from Romeo and Juilet. But to rise funds The King trick some locale town’s people into giving him around 80 dollars. After that Huck runs into a incident that involves a drunk names Boggs and a man called Sheburns. After several Threats made towards Sheburns, Boggs is shot down by him. One man rallies up the town people to lynch Sheburns, but they back down after he calls them all cowards (and the people in the south cowards in general). After that the The Dukes plan started. The audience laughed and the duke was mad about that. Afterwards, The duke decided that the audience wanted low humor, so he decided to not admitte women and children to bring in a bigger crowd.
Sometimes you have to look at Huck and wonder How have you not been permanently messed up by all the things you been through? First he sees two men try to murder a man in a boat, then he sees the dead body of his friend, and now he has seen a man shot in the streets. But he seems to be handling himself well, for now. I do find the whole Lynching situation interesting. They heard Sheburns say to Boggs you have till one o clock to stop messing with him, so they probably knew what the going to happen. It does make you wonder if Boggs was a good man when he was not drunk. Sheburns calling the mob out about lynch (and the practice of Lynch and Mob actions in general) very amusing, It is very easy to go along with a terrible action when it is in a group. He calls them all cowards for not having the balls to do something alone. If the fear of dying first from the shotgun Sheburns was carrying at the timewas not there, would the crowd ignored his words and went through with it? With the actions of the group, it is hard to lay the blame and the guilt on one person. I also love the fact that the Duke feels like he needs to dumb down the show to get a bigger audience. This is always a sad principle that always seems to be true. Instead of trying to get people to think, the performer decides just to lower himself. You can also make this comparison to the SOLs. (Standards of Learning). They were noticing that fewer and fewer kids were passing them each year, so instead of just keeping the same test, they decided to dumb it down just to pass more kids. In the long run, that doesn’t help the future generation, which makes them dumber. They should let them rise to the occasion, not lower their standards.
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