In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, what is the author's tone in the following passage?... but, as I was saying, she died before she got her...

Your question raises an interesting issue, which is the
way in which Twain writes from the perspective of Huckleberry Finn, yet at the same time
obviously also uses Huck as a mouthpiece to subtley make it clear what he thinks about a
variety of issues. In Chapter Seventeen, where your quote is taken from, we are
introduced to the dead Emmeline Grangerford and her paintings. Emmeline Grangerford was
a girl who was clearly obsessed by death, and the painting that your quote refers to
indicates this maudlin obsession of hers. Note what we are told about
it:

It was a
picture of a young woman in a long white gown, standing on teh rail of a bridge all
ready to jump off, with her hair all down her back, and looking up to the moon, with the
tears running down her face, and she had two arms folded across her breast, and two arms
stretched out in front, and two more reaching up towards the moon--and the idea was to
see which pair would look best, and then scratch out all the other
arms...

The way in which the
girl is presented and the added detail of the arms, which, Huck says, make the girl in
the picture look "too spidery" clearly indicate the tone of ridicule and mockery that
Twain uses to describe Emmeline Grangerford and her artistic endeavours. The way that
she died before she was able to finish this painting, leaving the "spider woman" behind
as a lasting testimony, is highly ironic, especially as her family treat it as a kind of
shrine to remember her by.