I believe if you leaf through Twain's Notebooks & Journals (which are well indexed), you'll come across various entries Twain made about expenditures as an adult, which he often wrote down. That won't be perfect if you're trying to correlate something in Huck's time with today, for example, but it's a start. I also highly recommend that you seek out a good business librarian and tell them your question. There are a number of sources that provide statistical cost indexes going back quite some time. They're fairly unreliable before 1860, but that's half the fun of the search. You might also check out newspapers from the time and place in which you're interested. Many advertisers weren't shy about listing prices. Scott Dalrymple