Chaps 1-4: 1st episode "Papa Returns"

                      Themes 
Superstition - when he kills the spider and his pa comes back
gullibility- when the gang charges after Sunday school kids believing that the elephants and the a-rabs.
The role of the outsider- when the lady teaches Huck about praying
                 
  allusions

bible- moses
Arabian nights
Don Quixote


                      characters
Aunt Polly, Mary, Widow Douglas, tom, Judge Thatcher, Huck, pap, Tommy Barnes, miss Watson, Joe Harper, Ben Rogers, Jim

                     part of plot
exposition

                   summary
In this episode Huck gets adopted by Widow Douglas and she tries to teach Huck about manners and how to be polite.  She tries to tame him.  She also teaches him about the bible and how praying will help him.  Huck doesn't understand how praying will help him. He prays for a fishing pole and hooks and gets the pole but not the hooks and gets mad.  Then Huck meets up with Tom Sawyer and the two start a gang with Tommy, Joe Harper, and Ben Rogers.  They decide they are going to go rob a group of a-rabs that have elephants and camels that are stocked with diamonds.  Huck decides to go because he wants to see an elephant, but when they get there there is no one there but Sunday School kids.  So they decide to rob the Sunday school kids, and then they get yelled at by the teachers.  Then Huck asks Tom where the elephants and the A-rabs were, and Tom said they were there but they were cloaked by wizards.  Which just means that Tom was using his imagination where Huck was not as educated as him and didn't know what imagination was.  After that robbery the gang decided not to be a gang anymore.  Then Huck a few days later goes outside and finds footsteps that are his father's footsteps, and then Huck runs down and tells Judge Thatcher that he wants him to have all his money.  And he gives Judge Thatcher $6,000, but Judge Thatcher doesn't truly take the money but tells Huck he does.  Huck goes to Jim and asks Jim to have the hairball tell Jim Huck's future.  The hairball tells Huck complete nonsense, except he tells Huck to stay away from water.  Which is a foreshadow to a later chapter when Huck gets on the raft and sails the Mississippi River.  Then Huck finds out his papa isn't dead, and he is sitting in Huck's room. 

journal 43 chapter 22 pg 208

"Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!" whispered her mother.  "We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest."

What this is saying is that Hester doesn't want Pearl to talk about Dimmesdale and Hester's plan to leave so that they can be together and be free to be a family. 

journal 42 chapter 22 pg 207

"Hester Prynne gazing stedfastly at the clergyman, felt a dreary influence come over her, but wherefore or whence she new not; unless that he seemed so remote from her own sphere, and utterly beyond her reach."
This is saying that Hester Prynne is looking at Dimmesdale who is off in his own world, thinking about different stuff.  Then Hester is thinking about the woods and how they were holding hands and all that stuff, and then she starts thinking about their future and wonders if Dimmesdale will act the way he acts in the woods in the new society or if he will act they way he acts as the minister towards her in the new society. 

Journal 41 Chapter 21 pg 199

" What a strange, sad man is he!""said the child as if speaking partly to herself."In the dark night-time, he calls us to him. and holds thy hand and mine, as when we stood on with him on the scaffold yonder!......."
What this is saying is that Pearl is putting together the pieces of the puzzel to why Dimmesdale wont be seen with them in public but in the woods he has a different personality. Dimmesdale will claim them as his family when it is dark and no one can see them. 

journal 40 chapter 20 pg 189

" It was the same town as heretofore; but the same minister returned not from the forest"
What this is saying is that the events that had occurred in the forest had changed Dimmesdale, but the town while he was gone had not changed at all.  Dimmesdale has changed because he is going to leave with Hester and Pearl and go to move to England and start a whole new life and not worry about what he was doing before. 

journal 39 chapter 20 pg195

"I think to need no more of your drugs my kind physician, good though they be, and administered by a friendly hand"
What Dimmesdale is saying is that because he has figured out how to take care of his problems he does not need the drugs to help him cope with his secret.

Journal 38 Chapter 19 pg181

"It was strange, the way in which Pearl stood, looking so steadfastly at them through the dim medium of the forest-gloom; herself, meanwhile, all glorified with a ray of sunshine..." (181)
Pearl is standing on the side that the sun is shining down on where as Hester and Dimmesdale are standing on the side where it is dark and shadowy.  This is because Hester and Dimmesdale have a secret  that they are hiding from everybody, and Pearl is pure and has no secrets.