From every point it is a masterpiece, this picture of boy life in a little lazy, drowsy town, with all the irresponsibility and general disreputability of boy character coupled with that indefinable, formless, elusive something we call boy conscience, which is more likely to be boy terror and a latent instinct of manliness.  These things are so truly portrayed that every boy and man reader finds the tale fitting into his own remembered years, as if it had grown there.  Every boy has played off sick to escape school; every boy has reflected in his heart Tom’s picture of himself being brought home dead, and gloated over the stricken consciences of those who had blighted his young life; every boy—­of that day, at least—­every normal, respectable boy, grew up to “fear God and dread the Sunday-school,” as Howells puts it in his review.

As for the story itself, the narrative of it, it is pure delight.  The pirate camp on the island is simply boy heaven.  What boy, for instance, would not change any other glory or boon that the world holds for this: 

They built a fire against the side of a great log twenty or thirty steps within the somber depths of the forest, and then cooked some bacon in the frying-pan for supper, and used up half of the corn “pone” stock they had brought.  It seemed glorious sport to be feasting in that wild, free way in the virgin forest of an unexplored and uninhabited island, far from the haunts of men, and they said they never would return to civilization.  The climbing fire lit up their faces and threw its ruddy glare upon the pillared tree-trunks of their forest-temple, and upon the varnished foliage and the festooning vines.

There is a magic in it.  Mark Twain, when he wrote it, felt renewed in him all the old fascination of those days and nights with Tom Blankenship, John Briggs, and the Bowen boys on Glasscock’s Island.  Everywhere in Tom Sawyer there is a quality, entirely apart from the humor and the narrative, which the younger reader is likely to overlook.  No one forgets the whitewashing scene, but not many of us, from our early reading, recall this delicious bit of description which introduces it: 

The locust-trees were in bloom, and the fragrance of the blossoms filled the air.  Cardiff Hill, beyond the village and above it, was green with vegetation, and it lay just far enough away to seem a delectable land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting.

Tom’s night visit home; the graveyard scene, with the murder of Dr. Robinson; the adventures of Tom and Becky in the cave—­these are all marvelously invented.  Literary thrill touches the ultimate in one incident of the cave episode.  Brander Matthews has written: