For Mencken, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" was the finest work of American literature. He particularly relished Mark Twain's depiction of a succession of gullible and ignorant townspeople, "boobs," as Mencken referred to them, who are repeatedly gulled by a pair of colorful con men: the deliberately- pathetic "Duke" and "Dauphin," with whom Huck and Jim travel down the Mississippi River. The hucksters pose now as earnest fundraisers for temperance, who get drunk on the proceeds; as pious "saved" men collecting money for a far off evangelistic mission; to pirates on the high seas; and as learned doctors of phrenology although they can barely spell. In the end, the townspeople wise up, and the scoundrels are ridden out on a rail. For Mencken, the episode epitomizes the hilarious dark side of America, where democracy, as defined by Mencken, is "the worship of jackals by jackasses."