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    The INTERNET WIRETAP First Electronic Edition of

      A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT

                           by

                       MARK TWAIN
                   (Samuel L. Clemens)

    Copyright, 1889 and 1899, by SAMUEL L. CLEMENS
           This text is in the PUBLIC DOMAIN.

      From The Writings of Mark Twain Volume XVI
        Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York


    Electronic Edition by <[e-mail]>
           Released to the public June 1993


                        PREFACE

THE ungentle laws and customs touched upon in
this tale are historical, and the episodes which are
used to illustrate them are also historical. It is
not pretended that these laws and customs existed in
England in the sixth century; no, it is only pretended
that inasmuch as they existed in the English and other
civilizations of far later times, it is safe to consider that
it is no libel upon the sixth century to suppose them to
have been in practice in that day also. One is quite
justified in inferring that whatever one of these laws or
customs was lacking in that remote time, its place was
competently filled by a worse one.

The question as to whether there is such a thing as
divine right of kings is not settled in this book. It
was found too difficult. That the executive head of a
nation should be a person of lofty character and
extraordinary ability, was manifest and indisputable;
that none but the Deity could select that head unerr-
ingly, was also manifest and indisputable; that the
Deity ought to make that selection, then, was likewise
manifest and indisputable; consequently, that He does
make it, as claimed, was an unavoidable deduction. I
mean, until the author of this book encountered the
Pompadour, and Lady Castlemaine, and some other
executive heads of that kind; these were found so
difficult to work into the scheme, that it was judged
better to take the other tack in this book (which must
be issued this fall), and then go into training and
settle the question in another book. It is, of course,
a thing which ought to be settled, and I am not going
to have anything particular to do next winter anyway.

                                      MARK TWAIN.


             A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING
                    ARTHUR'S COURT


A WORD OF EXPLANATION

IT was in Warwick Castle that I came across the
curious stranger whom I am going to talk about.
He attracted me by three things: his candid simplicity,
his marvelous familiarity with ancient armor, and the
restfulness of his company -- for he did all the talking.
We fell together, as modest people will, in the tail of
the herd that was being shown through, and he at once
began to say things which interested me. As he
talked along, softly, pleasantly, flowingly, he seemed
to drift away imperceptibly out of this world and time,
and into some remote era and old forgotten country;
and so he gradually wove such a spell about me that I
seemed to move among the specters and shadows and
dust and mold of a gray antiquity, holding speech with
a relic of it! Exactly as I would speak of my nearest
personal friends or enemies, or my most familiar
neighbors, he spoke of Sir Bedivere, Sir Bors de
Ganis, Sir Launcelot of the Lake, Sir Galahad, and all
the other great names of the Table Round -- and how
old, old, unspeakably old and faded and dry and
musty and ancient he came to look as he went on!
Presently he turned to me and said, just as one might
speak of the weather, or any other common matter --

"You know about transmigration of souls; do you
know about transposition of epochs -- and bodies?"

I said I had not heard of it. He was so little inter-
ested -- just as when people speak of the weather --
that he did not notice whether I made him any answer
or not. There was half a moment of silence, imme-
diately interrupted by the droning voice of the salaried
cicerone:

"Ancient hauberk, date of the sixth century, time
of King Arthur and the Round Table; said to have
belonged to the knight Sir Sagramor le Desirous; ob-
serve the round hole through the chain-mail in the left
breast; can't be accounted for; supposed to have been
done with a bullet since invention of firearms -- per-
haps maliciously by Cromwell's soldiers."

My acquaintance smiled -- not a modern smile, but
one that must have gone out of general use many, many
centuries ago -- and muttered apparently to himself:

"Wit ye well, I SAW IT DONE." Then, after a pause,
added: "I did it myself."

By the time I had recovered from the electric sur-
prise of this remark, he was gone.

All that evening I sat by my fire at the Warwick
Arms, steeped in a dream of the olden time, while the
rain beat upon the windows, and the wind roared about
the eaves and corners. From time to time I dipped
into old Sir Thomas Malory's enchanting book, and
fed at its rich feast of prodigies and adventures,
breathed in the fragrance of its obsolete names, and
dreamed again. Midnight being come at length, I read
another tale, for a nightcap -- this which here follows,
to wit:

   HOW SIR LAUNCELOT SLEW TWO GIANTS, AND MADE A
                    CASTLE FREE

   Anon withal came there upon him two great giants,
   well armed, all save the heads, with two horrible
   clubs in their hands. Sir Launcelot put his shield
   afore him, and put the stroke away of the one
   giant, and with his sword he clave his head asunder.
   When his fellow saw that, he ran away as he were
   wood [* demented], for fear of the horrible strokes,
   and Sir Launcelot after him with all his might,
   and smote him on the shoulder, and clave him to
   the middle. Then Sir Launcelot went into the hall,
   and there came afore him three score ladies and
   damsels, and all kneeled unto him, and thanked
   God and him of their deliverance. For, sir, said
   they, the most part of us have been here this
   seven year their prisoners, and we have worked all
   manner of silk works for our meat, and we are all
   great gentle-women born, and blessed be the time,
   knight, that ever thou wert born;for thou hast
   done the most worship that ever did knight in the
   world, that will we bear record, and we all pray
   you to tell us your name, that we may tell our
   friends who delivered us out of prison. Fair
   damsels, he said, my name is Sir Launcelot du
   Lake. And so he departed from them and betaught
   them unto God. And then he mounted upon his
   horse, and rode into many strange and wild
   countries, and through many waters and valleys,
   and evil was he lodged. And at the last by
   fortune him happened against a night to come to
   a fair courtilage, and therein he found an old
   gentle-woman that lodged him with a good-will,
   and there he had good cheer for him and his horse.
   And when time was, his host brought him into a
   fair garret over the gate to his bed. There
   Sir Launcelot unarmed him, and set his harness
   by him, and went to bed, and anon he fell on
   sleep. So, soon after there came one on
   horseback, and knocked at the gate in great
   haste. And when Sir Launcelot heard this he rose
   up, and looked out at the window, and saw by the
   moonlight three knights come riding after that
   one man, and all three lashed on him at once
   with swords, and that one knight turned on them
   knightly again and defended him. Truly, said
   Sir Launcelot, yonder one knight shall I help,
   for it were shame for me to see three knights
   on one, and if he be slain I am partner of his
   death. And therewith he took his harness and
   went out at a window by a sheet down to the four
   knights, and then Sir Launcelot said on high,
   Turn you knights unto me, and leave your
   fighting with that knight. And then they all
   three left Sir Kay, and turned unto Sir Launcelot,
   and there began great battle, for they alight
   all three, and strake many strokes at Sir
   Launcelot, and assailed him on every side. Then
   Sir Kay dressed him for to have holpen Sir
   Launcelot. Nay, sir, said he, I will none of
   your help, therefore as ye will have my help
   let me alone with them. Sir Kay for the pleasure
   of the knight suffered him for to do his will,
   and so stood aside. And then anon within six
   strokes Sir Launcelot had stricken them to the
   earth.

   And then they all three cried, Sir Knight, we
   yield us unto you as man of might matchless. As
   to that, said Sir Launcelot, I will not take
   your yielding unto me, but so that ye yield
   you unto Sir Kay the seneschal, on that covenant
   I will save your lives and else not. Fair knight,
   said they, that were we loath to do; for as for
   Sir Kay we chased him hither, and had overcome
   him had ye not been; therefore, to yield us unto
   him it were no reason. Well, as to that, said
   Sir Launcelot, advise you well, for ye may
   choose whether ye will die or live, for an ye be
   yielden, it shall be unto Sir Kay. Fair knight,
   then they said, in saving our lives we will do
   as thou commandest us. Then shall ye, said Sir
   Launcelot, on Whitsunday next coming go unto the
   court of King Arthur, and there shall ye yield
   you unto Queen Guenever, and put you all three
   in her grace and mercy, and say that Sir Kay
   sent you thither to be her prisoners. On the morn
   Sir Launcelot arose early, and left Sir Kay
   sleeping; and Sir Launcelot took Sir Kay's armor
   and his shield and armed him, and so he went to
   the stable and took his horse, and took his leave
   of his host, and so he departed. Then soon after
   arose Sir Kay and missed Sir Launcelot; and
   then he espied that he had his armor and his
   horse. Now by my faith I know well that he will
   grieve some of the court of King Arthur; for on
   him knights will be bold, and deem that it is I,
   and that will beguile them; and because of his
   armor and shield I am sure I shall ride in peace.
   And then soon after departed Sir Kay, and
   thanked his host.

As I laid the book down there was a knock at the
door, and my stranger came in. I gave him a pipe
and a chair, and made him welcome. I also comforted
him with a hot Scotch whisky; gave him another one;
then still another -- hoping always for his story. After
a fourth persuader, he drifted into it himself, in a quite
simple and natural way:


THE STRANGER'S HISTORY

I am an American. I was born and reared in Hart-
ford, in the State of Connecticut -- anyway, just over
the river, in the country. So I am a Yankee of the
Yankees -- and practical; yes, and nearly barren of
sentiment, I suppose -- or poetry, in other words. My
father was a blacksmith, my uncle was a horse doctor,
and I was both, along at first. Then I went over to
the great arms factory and learned my real trade;
learned all there was to it; learned to make every-
thing: guns, revolvers, cannon, boilers, engines, all
sorts of labor-saving machinery. Why, I could make
anything a body wanted -- anything in the world, it
didn't make any difference what; and if there wasn't
any quick new-fangled way to make a thing, I could
invent one -- and do it as easy as rolling off a log. I
became head superintendent; had a couple of thou-
sand men under me.

Well, a man like that is a man that is full of fight --
that goes without saying. With a couple of thousand
rough men under one, one has plenty of that sort of
amusement. I had, anyway. At last I met my match,
and I got my dose. It was during a misunderstanding
conducted with crowbars with a fellow we used to call
Hercules. He laid me out with a crusher alongside
the head that made everything crack, and seemed to
spring every joint in my skull and made it overlap its
neighbor. Then the world went out in darkness, and
I didn't feel anything more, and didn't know anything
at all -- at least for a while.

When I came to again, I was sitting under an oak
tree, on the grass, with a whole beautiful and broad
country landscape all to myself -- nearly. Not en-
tirely; for there was a fellow on a horse, looking down
at me -- a fellow fresh out of a picture-book. He was
in old-time iron armor from head to heel, with a
helmet on his head the shape of a nail-keg with slits
in it; and he had a shield, and a sword, and a pro-
digious spear; and his horse had armor on, too, and a
steel horn projecting from his forehead, and gorgeous
red and green silk trappings that hung down all around
him like a bedquilt, nearly to the ground.

"Fair sir, will ye just?" said this fellow.

"Will I which?"

"Will ye try a passage of arms for land or lady or
for --"

"What are you giving me?" I said. "Get along
back to your circus, or I'll report you."

Now what does this man do but fall back a couple
of hundred yards and then come rushing at me as hard
as he could tear, with his nail-keg bent down nearly to
his horse's neck and his long spear pointed straight
ahead. I saw he meant business, so I was up the tree
when he arrived.

He allowed that I was his property, the captive of
his spear. There was argument on his side -- and the
bulk of the advantage -- so I judged it best to humor
him. We fixed up an agreement whereby I was to go
with him and he was not to hurt me. I came down,
and we started away, I walking by the side of his
horse. We marched comfortably along, through glades
and over brooks which I could not remember to have
seen before -- which puzzled me and made me wonder
-- and yet we did not come to any circus or sign of
a circus. So I gave up the idea of a circus, and con-
cluded he was from an asylum. But we never came to
an asylum -- so I was up a stump, as you may say. I
asked him how far we were from Hartford. He said
he had never heard of the place; which I took to be a
lie, but allowed it to go at that. At the end of an
hour we saw a far-away town sleeping in a valley by a
winding river; and beyond it on a hill, a vast gray
fortress, with towers and turrets, the first I had ever
seen out of a picture.

"Bridgeport?" said I, pointing.

"Camelot," said he.

My stranger had been showing signs of sleepiness.
He caught himself nodding, now, and smiled one of
those pathetic, obsolete smiles of his, and said:

"I find I can't go on; but come with me, I've got
it all written out, and you can read it if you like."

In his chamber, he said: "First, I kept a journal;
then by and by, after years, I took the journal and
turned it into a book. How long ago that was!"

He handed me his manuscript, and pointed out the
place where I should begin:

"Begin here -- I've already told you what goes be-
fore." He was steeped in drowsiness by this time.
As I went out at his door I heard him murmur sleep-
ily: "Give you good den, fair sir."

I sat down by my fire and examined my treasure.
The first part of it -- the great bulk of it -- was parch-
ment, and yellow with age. I scanned a leaf particu-
larly and saw that it was a palimpsest. Under the old
dim writing of the Yankee historian appeared traces of
a penmanship which was older and dimmer still --
Latin words and sentences: fragments from old monk-
ish legends, evidently. I turned to the place indicated
by my stranger and began to read -- as follows:



THE TALE OF THE LOST LAND.


CHAPTER I.
CAMELOT

"CAMELOT -- Camelot," said I to myself. "I
don't seem to remember hearing of it before.
Name of the asylum, likely."

It was a soft, reposeful summer landscape, as lovely
as a dream, and as lonesome as Sunday. The air was
full of the smell of flowers, and the buzzing of insects,
and the twittering of birds, and there were no people,
no wagons, there was no stir of life, nothing going on.
The road was mainly a winding path with hoof-prints
in it, and now and then a faint trace of wheels on
either side in the grass -- wheels that apparently had a
tire as broad as one's hand.

Presently a fair slip of a girl, about ten years old,
with a cataract of golden hair streaming down over her
shoulders, came along. Around her head she wore a
hoop of flame-red poppies. It was as sweet an outfit
as ever I saw, what there was of it. She walked indo-
lently along, with a mind at rest, its peace reflected in
her innocent face. The circus man paid no attention
to her; didn't even seem to see her. And she -- she
was no more startled at his fantastic make-up than if
she was used to his like every day of her life. She
was going by as indifferently as she might have gone
by a couple of cows; but when she happened to notice
me, THEN there was a change! Up went her hands,
and she was turned to stone; her mouth dropped
open, her eyes stared wide and timorously, she was
the picture of astonished curiosity touched with fear.
And there she stood gazing, in a sort of stupefied
fascination, till we turned a corner of the wood and
were lost to her view. That she should be startled at
me instead of at the other man, was too many for me;
I couldn't make head or tail of it . And that she
should seem to consider me a spectacle, and totally
overlook her own merits in that respect, was another
puzzling thing, and a display of magnanimity, too,
that was surprising in one so young. There was food
for thought here. I moved along as one in a dream.

As we approached the town, signs of life began to
appear. At intervals we passed a wretched cabin, with
a thatched roof, and about it small fields and garden
patches in an indifferent state of cultivation. There
were people, too; brawny men, with long, coarse, un-
combed hair that hung down over their faces and made
them look like animals. They and the women, as a
rule, wore a coarse tow-linen robe that came well below
the knee, and a rude sort of sandal, and many wore
an iron collar. The small boys and girls were always
naked; but nobody seemed to know it. All of these
people stared at me, talked about me, ran into the huts
and fetched out their families to gape at me; but no-
body ever noticed that other fellow, except to make
him humble salutation and get no response for their
pains.

In the town were some substantial windowless houses
of stone scattered among a wilderness of thatched
cabins; the streets were mere crooked alleys, and un-
paved; troops of dogs and nude children played in the
sun and made life and noise; hogs roamed and rooted
contentedly about, and one of them lay in a reeking
wallow in the middle of the main thoroughfare and
suckled her family. Presently there was a distant blare
of military music; it came nearer, still nearer, and
soon a noble cavalcade wound into view, glorious with
plumed helmets and flashing mail and flaunting banners
and rich doublets and horse-cloths and gilded spear-
heads; and through the muck and swine, and naked
brats, and joyous dogs, and shabby huts, it took its
gallant way, and in its wake we followed. Followed
through one winding alley and then another, -- and
climbing, always climbing -- till at last we gained the
breezy height where the huge castle stood. There was
an exchange of bugle blasts; then a parley from the
walls, where men-at-arms, in hauberk and morion,
marched back and forth with halberd at shoulder
under flapping banners with the rude figure of a dragon
displayed upon them; and then the great gates were
flung open, the drawbridge was lowered, and the head
of the cavalcade swept forward under the frowning
arches; and we, following, soon found ourselves in a
great paved court, with towers and turrets stretching
up into the blue air on all the four sides; and all about
us.the dismount was going on, and much greeting and
ceremony, and running to and fro, and a gay display
of moving and intermingling colors, and an altogether
pleasant stir and noise and confusion.


CHAPTER II.
KING ARTHUR'S COURT

THE moment I got a chance I slipped aside privately
and touched an ancient common looking man on
the shoulder and said, in an insinuating, confidential
way:

"Friend, do me a kindness. Do you belong to the
asylum, or are you just on a visit or something
like that?"

He looked me over stupidly, and said:

"Marry, fair sir, me seemeth --"

"That will do," I said; "I reckon you are a
patient."

I moved away, cogitating, and at the same time
keeping an eye out for any chance passenger in his
right mind that might come along and give me some
light. I judged I had found one, presently; so I
drew him aside and said in his ear:

"If I could see the head keeper a minute -- only
just a minute --"

"Prithee do not let me."

"Let you WHAT?"

"HINDER me, then, if the word please thee better.
Then he went on to say he was an under-cook and
could not stop to gossip, though he would like it
another time; for it would comfort his very liver to
know where I got my clothes. As he started away he
pointed and said yonder was one who was idle enough
for my purpose, and was seeking me besides, no
doubt. This was an airy slim boy in shrimp-colored
tights that made him look like a forked carrot, the
rest of his gear was blue silk and dainty laces and
ruffles; and he had long yellow curls, and wore a
plumed pink satin cap tilted complacently over his
ear. By his look, he was good-natured; by his gait,
he was satisfied with himself. He was pretty enough
to frame. He arrived, looked me over with a smiling
and impudent curiosity; said he had come for me, and
informed me that he was a page.

"Go 'long," I said; "you ain't more than a para-
graph."

It was pretty severe, but I was nettled. However,
it never phazed him; he didn't appear to know he was
hurt. He began to talk and laugh, in happy, thought-
less, boyish fashion, as we walked along, and made
himself old friends with me at once; asked me all sorts
of questions about myself and about my clothes, but
never waited for an answer -- always chattered straight
ahead, as if he didn't know he had asked a question
and wasn't expecting any reply, until at last he hap-
pened to mention that he was born in the beginning of
the year 513.

It made the cold chills creep over me! I stopped
and said, a little faintly:

"Maybe I didn't hear you just right. Say it again
-- and say it slow. What year was it?"

"513."

"513! You don't look it! Come, my boy, I am
a stranger and friendless; be honest and honorable
with me. Are you in your right mind?"

He said he was.

"Are these other people in their right minds?"

He said they were.

"And this isn't an asylum? I mean, it isn't a place
where they cure crazy people?"

He said it wasn't.

"Well, then," I said, "either I am a lunatic, or
something just as awful has happened. Now tell me,
honest and true, where am I?"

"IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT."

I waited a minute, to let that idea shudder its way
home, and then said:

"And according to your notions, what year is it now?"

"528 -- nineteenth of June."

I felt a mournful sinking at the heart, and muttered:
"I shall never see my friends again -- never, never
again. They will not be born for more than thirteen
hundred years yet."

I seemed to believe the boy, I didn't know why.
SOMETHING in me seemed to believe him -- my con-
sciousness, as you may say; but my reason didn't.
My reason straightway began to clamor; that was
natural. I didn't know how to go about satisfying it,
because I knew that the testimony of men wouldn't
serve -- my reason would say they were lunatics, and
throw out their evidence. But all of a sudden I stum-
bled on the very thing, just by luck. I knew that the
only total eclipse of the sun in the first half of the
sixth century occurred on the 21st of June, A. D. 528,
O.S., and began at 3 minutes after 12 noon. I also
knew that no total eclipse of the sun was due in what
to ME was the present year -- i.e., 1879. So, if I
could keep my anxiety and curiosity from eating the
heart out of me for forty-eight hours, I should then
find out for certain whether this boy was telling me the
truth or not.

Wherefore, being a practical Connecticut man, I now
shoved this whole problem clear out of my mind till its
appointed day and hour should come, in order that I
might turn all my attention to the circumstances of the
present moment, and be alert and ready to make the
most out of them that could be made. One thing at a
time, is my motto -- and just play that thing for all it
is worth, even if it's only two pair and a jack. I made
up my mind to two things: if it was still the nineteenth
century and I was among lunatics and couldn't get
away, I would presently boss that asylum or know the
reason why; and if, on the other hand, it was really
the sixth century, all right, I didn't want any softer
thing: I would boss the whole country inside of three
months; for I judged I would have the start of the
best-educated man in the kingdom by a matter of
thirteen hundred years and upward. I'm not a man
to waste time after my mind's made up and there's
work on hand; so I said to the page:

"Now, Clarence, my boy -- if that might happen to
be your name -- I'll get you to post me up a little if
you don't mind. What is the name of that apparition
that brought me here?"

"My master and thine? That is the good knight
and great lord Sir Kay the Seneschal, foster brother to
our liege the king."

"Very good; go on, tell me everything."

He made a long story of it; but the part that had
immediate interest for me was this: He said I was Sir
Kay's prisoner, and that in the due course of custom
I would be flung into a dungeon and left there on scant
commons until my friends ransomed me -- unless I
chanced to rot, first. I saw that the last chance had
the best show, but I didn't waste any bother about
that; time was too precious. The page said, further,
that dinner was about ended in the great hall by this
time, and that as soon as the sociability and the heavy
drinking should begin, Sir Kay would have me in and
exhibit me before King Arthur and his illustrious
knights seated at the Table Round, and would brag
about his exploit in capturing me, and would probably
exaggerate the facts a little, but it wouldn't be good
form for me to correct him, and not over safe, either;
and when I was done being exhibited, then ho for the
dungeon; but he, Clarence, would find a way to come
and see me every now and then, and cheer me up, and
help me get word to my friends.

Get word to my friends! I thanked him; I couldn't
do less; and about this time a lackey came to say I
was wanted; so Clarence led me in and took me off to
one side and sat down by me.

Well, it was a curious kind of spectacle, and interest-
ing. It was an immense place, and rather naked --
yes, and full of loud contrasts. It was very, very
lofty; so lofty that the banners depending from the
arched beams and girders away up there floated in a
sort of twilight; there was a stone-railed gallery at
each end, high up, with musicians in the one, and
women, clothed in stunning colors, in the other. The
floor was of big stone flags laid in black and white
squares, rather battered by age and use, and needing
repair. As to ornament, there wasn't any, strictly
speaking; though on the walls hung some huge tapes-
tries which were probably taxed as works of art;
battle-pieces, they were, with horses shaped like those
which children cut out of paper or create in ginger-
bread; with men on them in scale armor whose scales
are represented by round holes -- so that the man's
coat looks as if it had been done with a biscuit-punch.
There was a fireplace big enough to camp in; and its
projecting sides and hood, of carved and pillared
stonework, had the look of a cathedral door. Along
the walls stood men-at-arms, in breastplate and morion,
with halberds for their only weapon -- rigid as statues;
and that is what they looked like.

In the middle of this groined and vaulted public
square was an oaken table which they called the Table
Round. It was as large as a circus ring; and around
it sat a great company of men dressed in such various
and splendid colors that it hurt one's eyes to look at
them. They wore their plumed hats, right along, ex-
cept that whenever one addressed himself directly to
the king, he lifted his hat a trifle just as he was begin-
ning his remark.

Mainly they were drinking -- from entire ox horns;
but a few were still munching bread or gnawing beef
bones. There was about an average of two dogs to
one man; and these sat in expectant attitudes till a
spent bone was flung to them, and then they went for
it by brigades and divisions, with a rush, and there
ensued a fight which filled the prospect with a tumultu-
ous chaos of plunging heads and bodies and flashing
tails, and the storm of howlings and barkings deafened
all speech for the time; but that was no matter, for
the dog-fight was always a bigger interest anyway; the
men rose, sometimes, to observe it the better and bet
on it, and the ladies and the musicians stretched them-
selves out over their balusters with the same object;
and all broke into delighted ejaculations from time to
time. In the end, the winning dog stretched himself
out comfortably with his bone between his paws, and
proceeded to growl over it, and gnaw it, and grease
the floor with it, just as fifty others were already doing;
and the rest of the court resumed their previous indus-
tries and entertainments.

As a rule, the speech and behavior of these people
were gracious and courtly; and I noticed that they
were good and serious listeners when anybody was tell-
ing anything -- I mean in a dog-fightless interval. And
plainly, too, they were a childlike and innocent lot;
telling lies of the stateliest pattern with a most gentle
and winning naivety, and ready and willing to listen to
anybody else's lie, and believe it, too. It was hard to
associate them with anything cruel or dreadful; and
yet they dealt in tales of blood and suffering with a
guileless relish that made me almost forget to shudder.

I was not the only prisoner present. There were
twenty or more. Poor devils, many of them were
maimed, hacked, carved, in a frightful way; and their
hair, their faces, their clothing, were caked with black
and stiffened drenchings of blood. They were suffer-
ing sharp physical pain, of course; and weariness, and
hunger and thirst, no doubt; and at least none had
given them the comfort of a wash, or even the poor
charity of a lotion for their wounds; yet you never
heard them utter a moan or a groan, or saw them show
any sign of restlessness, or any disposition to com-
plain. The thought was forced upon me: "The ras-
cals -- THEY have served other people so in their day;
it being their own turn, now, they were not expecting
any better treatment than this; so their philosophical
bearing is not an outcome of mental training, intellec-
tual fortitude, reasoning; it is mere animal training;
they are white Indians."


CHAPTER III.
KNIGHTS OF THE TABLE ROUND

MAINLY the Round Table talk was monologues --
narrative accounts of the adventures in which
these prisoners were captured and their friends and
backers killed and stripped of their steeds and armor.
As a general thing -- as far as I could make out --
these murderous adventures were not forays undertaken
to avenge injuries, nor to settle old disputes or sudden
fallings out; no, as a rule they were simply duels be-
tween strangers -- duels between people who had never
even been introduced to each other, and between
whom existed no cause of offense whatever. Many a
time I had seen a couple of boys, strangers, meet by
chance, and say simultaneously, "I can lick you," and
go at it on the spot; but I had always imagined until
now that that sort of thing belonged to children only,
and was a sign and mark of childhood; but here were
these big boobies sticking to it and taking pride in it
clear up into full age and beyond. Yet there was some-
thing very engaging about these great simple-hearted
creatures, something attractive and lovable. There did
not seem to be brains enough in the entire nursery, so
to speak, to bait a fish-hook with; but you didn't seem
to mind that, after a little, because you soon saw that
brains were not needed in a society like that, and in-
deed would have marred it, hindered it, spoiled its sym-
metry -- perhaps rendered its existence impossible.

There was a fine manliness observable in almost every
face; and in some a certain loftiness and sweetness that
rebuked your belittling criticisms and stilled them. A
most noble benignity and purity reposed in the counte-
nance of him they called Sir Galahad, and likewise in the
king's also; and there was majesty and greatness in
the giant frame and high bearing of Sir Launcelot of
the Lake.

There was presently an incident which centered the
general interest upon this Sir Launcelot. At a sign
from a sort of master of ceremonies, six or eight of the
prisoners rose and came forward in a body and knelt
on the floor and lifted up their hands toward the ladies'
gallery and begged the grace of a word with the queen.
The most conspicuously situated lady in that massed
flower-bed of feminine show and finery inclined her
head by way of assent, and then the spokesman of the
prisoners delivered himself and his fellows into her
hands for free pardon, ransom, captivity, or death, as
she in her good pleasure might elect; and this, as he
said, he was doing by command of Sir Kay the Senes-
chal, whose prisoners they were, he having vanquished
them by his single might and prowess in sturdy conflict
in the field.

Surprise and astonishment flashed from face to face
all over the house; the queen's gratified smile faded
out at the name of Sir Kay, and she looked disap-
pointed; and the page whispered in my ear with an
accent and manner expressive of extravagant derision --

"Sir KAY, forsooth! Oh, call me pet names, dear-
est, call me a marine! In twice a thousand years shall
the unholy invention of man labor at odds to beget the
fellow to this majestic lie!"

Every eye was fastened with severe inquiry upon Sir
Kay. But he was equal to the occasion. He got up
and played his hand like a major -- and took every
trick. He said he would state the case exactly accord-
ing to the facts; he would tell the simple straightfor-
ward tale, without comment of his own; "and then,"
said he, "if ye find glory and honor due, ye will give
it unto him who is the mightiest man of his hands that
ever bare shield or strake with sword in the ranks of
Christian battle -- even him that sitteth there!" and he
pointed to Sir Launcelot. Ah, he fetched them; it
was a rattling good stroke. Then he went on and told
how Sir Launcelot, seeking adventures, some brief time
gone by, killed seven giants at one sweep of his sword,
and set a hundred and forty-two captive maidens free;
and then went further, still seeking adventures, and
found him (Sir Kay) fighting a desperate fight against
nine foreign knights, and straightway took the battle
solely into his own hands, and conquered the nine; and
that night Sir Launcelot rose quietly, and dressed him
in Sir Kay's armor and took Sir Kay's horse and gat
him away into distant lands, and vanquished sixteen
knights in one pitched battle and thirty-four in another;
and all these and the former nine he made to swear
that about Whitsuntide they would ride to Arthur's
court and yield them to Queen Guenever's hands as
captives of Sir Kay the Seneschal, spoil of his knightly
prowess; and now here were these half dozen, and the
rest would be along as soon as they might be healed of
their desperate wounds.

Well, it was touching to see the queen blush and
smile, and look embarrassed and happy, and fling fur-
tive glances at Sir Launcelot that would have got him
shot in Arkansas, to a dead certainty.

Everybody praised the valor and magnanimity of Sir
Launcelot; and as for me, I was perfectly amazed,
that one man, all by himself, should have been able to
beat down and capture such battalions of practiced
fighters. I said as much to Clarence; but this mock-
ing featherhead only said:

"An Sir Kay had had time to get another skin of
sour wine into him, ye had seen the accompt doubled."

I looked at the boy in sorrow; and as I looked I saw
the cloud of a deep despondency settle upon his counte-
nance. I followed the direction of his eye, and saw that
a very old and white-bearded man, clothed in a flowing
black gown, had risen and was standing at the table
upon unsteady legs, and feebly swaying his ancient
head and surveying the company with his watery and
wandering eye. The same suffering look that was in
the page's face was observable in all the faces around
-- the look of dumb creatures who know that they must
endure and make no moan.

"Marry, we shall have it a again," sighed the boy;
"that same old weary tale that he hath told a
thousand times in the same words, and that he WILL tell
till he dieth, every time he hath gotten his barrel full
and feeleth his exaggeration-mill a-working. Would
God I had died or I saw this day!"

"Who is it?"

"Merlin, the mighty liar and magician, perdition
singe him for the weariness he worketh with his one
tale! But that men fear him for that he hath the
storms and the lightnings and all the devils that be in
hell at his beck and call, they would have dug his en-
trails out these many years ago to get at that tale and
squelch it. He telleth it always in the third person,
making believe he is too modest to glorify himself --
maledictions light upon him, misfortune be his dole!
Good friend, prithee call me for evensong."

The boy nestled himself upon my shoulder and pre-
tended to go to sleep. The old man began his tale;
and presently the lad was asleep in reality; so also were
the dogs, and the court, the lackeys, and the files of
men-at-arms. The droning voice droned on; a soft
snoring arose on all sides and supported it like a deep
and subdued accompaniment of wind instruments.
Some heads were bowed upon folded arms, some lay
back with open mouths that issued unconscious music;
the flies buzzed and bit, unmolested, the rats swarmed
softly out from a hundred holes, and pattered about,
and made themselves at home everywhere; and one of
them sat up like a squirrel on the king's head and held
a bit of cheese in its hands and nibbled it, and dribbled
the crumbs in the king's face with naive and impudent
irreverence. It was a tranquil scene, and restful to the
weary eye and the jaded spirit.

This was the old man's tale. He said:

"Right so the king and Merlin departed, and went
until an hermit that was a good man and a great leech.
So the hermit searched all his wounds and gave him
good salves; so the king was there three days, and then
were his wounds well amended that he might ride and
go, and so departed. And as they rode, Arthur said,
I have no sword. No force *,  said Merlin, hereby is a
[* Footnote from M.T.: No matter.]
sword that shall be yours and I may. So they rode till
they came to a lake, the which was a fair water and
broad, and in the midst of the lake Arthur was ware of
an arm clothed in white samite, that held a fair sword
in that hand. Lo, said Merlin, yonder is that sword
that I spake of. With that they saw a damsel going
upon the lake. What damsel is that? said Arthur.
That is the Lady of the lake, said Merlin; and within
that lake is a rock, and therein is as fair a place as any
on earth, and richly beseen, and this damsel will come
to you anon, and then speak ye fair to her that she will
give you that sword. Anon withal came the damsel
unto Arthur and saluted him, and he her again.
Damsel, said Arthur, what sword is that, that yonder
the arm holdeth above the water? I would it were
mine, for I have no sword. Sir Arthur King, said the
damsel, that sword is mine, and if ye will give me a gift
when I ask it you, ye shall have it. By my faith, said
Arthur, I will give you what gift ye will ask. Well,
said the damsel, go ye into yonder barge and row your-
self to the sword, and take it and the scabbard with
you, and I will ask my gift when I see my time. So
Sir Arthur and Merlin alight, and tied their horses to
two trees, and so they went into the ship, and when
they came to the sword that the hand held, Sir Arthur
took it up by the handles, and took it with him. And
the arm and the hand went under the water; and so
they came unto the land and rode forth. And then Sir
Arthur saw a rich pavilion. What signifieth yonder
pavilion? It is the knight's pavilion, said Merlin,
that ye fought with last, Sir Pellinore, but he is
out, he is not there; he hath ado with a knight of
yours, that hight Egglame, and they have fought
together, but at the last Egglame fled, and else he had
been dead, and he hath chased him even to Carlion,
and we shall meet with him anon in the highway. That
is well said, said Arthur, now have I a sword, now will
I wage battle with him, and be avenged on him. Sir,
ye shall not so, said Merlin, for the knight is weary of
fighting and chasing, so that ye shall have no worship
to have ado with him; also, he will not lightly be
matched of one knight living; and therefore it is my
counsel, let him pass, for he shall do you good service
in short time, and his sons, after his days. Also ye
shall see that day in short space ye shall be right glad
to give him your sister to wed. When I see him, I will
do as ye advise me, said Arthur. Then Sir Arthur
looked on the sword, and liked it passing well.
Whether liketh you better, said Merlin, the sword or
the scabbard? Me liketh better the sword, said Arthur.
Ye are more unwise, said Merlin, for the scabbard is
worth ten of the sword, for while ye have the scabbard
upon you ye shall never lose no blood, be ye never so
sore wounded; therefore, keep well the scabbard always
with you. So they rode into Carlion, and by the way
they met with Sir Pellinore; but Merlin had done such
a craft that Pellinore saw not Arthur, and he passed by
without any words. I marvel, said Arthur, that the
knight would not speak. Sir, said Merlin, he saw you
not; for and he had seen you ye had not lightly de-
parted. So they came unto Carlion, whereof his
knights were passing glad. And when they heard of
his adventures they marveled that he would jeopard his
person so alone. But all men of worship said it was
merry to be under such a chieftain that would put his
person in adventure as other poor knights did."


CHAPTER IV.
SIR DINADAN THE HUMORIST

IT seemed to me that this quaint lie was most simply
and beautifully told; but then I had heard it only
once, and that makes a difference; it was pleasant to
the others when it was fresh, no doubt.

Sir Dinadan the Humorist was the first to awake, and
he soon roused the rest with a practical joke of a suffi-
ciently poor quality. He tied some metal mugs to a
dog's tail and turned him loose, and he tore around and
around the place in a frenzy of fright, with all the other
dogs bellowing after him and battering and crashing
against everything that came in their way and making
altogether a chaos of confusion and a most deafening
din and turmoil; at which every man and woman of the
multitude laughed till the tears flowed, and some fell
out of their chairs and wallowed on the floor in ecstasy.
It was just like so many children. Sir Dinadan was so
proud of his exploit that he could not keep from telling
over and over again, to weariness, how the immortal
idea happened to occur to him; and as is the way with
humorists of his breed, he was still laughing at it after
everybody else had got through. He was so set up
that he concluded to make a speech -- of course a
humorous speech. I think I never heard so many old
played-out jokes strung together in my life. He was
worse than the minstrels, worse than the clown in the
circus. It seemed peculiarly sad to sit here, thirteen
hundred years before I was born, and listen again to
poor, flat, worm-eaten jokes that had given me the dry
gripes when I was a boy thirteen hundred years after-
wards. It about convinced me that there isn't any such
thing as a new joke possible. Everybody laughed at
these antiquities -- but then they always do; I had
noticed that, centuries later. However, of course the
scoffer didn't laugh -- I mean the boy. No, he scoffed;
there wasn't anything he wouldn't scoff at. He said
the most of Sir Dinadan's jokes were rotten and the rest
were petrified. I said "petrified" was good; as I be-
lieved, myself, that the only right way to classify the
majestic ages of some of those jokes was by geologic
periods. But that neat idea hit the boy in a blank
place, for geology hadn't been invented yet. However,
I made a note of the remark, and calculated to educate
the commonwealth up to it if I pulled through. It is
no use to throw a good thing away merely because the
market isn't ripe yet.

Now Sir Kay arose and began to fire up on his his-
tory-mill with me for fuel. It was time for me to feel
serious, and I did. Sir Kay told how he had en-
countered me in a far land of barbarians, who all wore
the same ridiculous garb that I did -- a garb that was a
work of enchantment, and intended to make the wearer
secure from hurt by human hands. However he had
nullified the force of the enchantment by prayer, and
had killed my thirteen knights in a three hours' battle,
and taken me prisoner, sparing my life in order that so
strange a curiosity as I was might be exhibited to the
wonder and admiration of the king and the court. He
spoke of me all the time, in the blandest way, as "this
prodigious giant," and "this horrible sky-towering
monster," and "this tusked and taloned man-devour-
ing ogre", and everybody took in all this bosh in the
naivest way, and never smiled or seemed to notice that
there was any discrepancy between these watered statis-
tics and me. He said that in trying to escape from him
I sprang into the top of a tree two hundred cubits high
at a single bound, but he dislodged me with a stone the
size of a cow, which "all-to brast" the most of my
bones, and then swore me to appear at Arthur's court
for sentence. He ended by condemning me to die at
noon on the 21st; and was so little concerned about it
that he stopped to yawn before he named the date.

I was in a dismal state by this time; indeed, I was
hardly enough in my right mind to keep the run of a
dispute that sprung up as to how I had better be killed,
the possibility of the killing being doubted by some,
because of the enchantment in my clothes. And yet it
was nothing but an ordinary suit of fifteen-dollar slop-
shops. Still, I was sane enough to notice this detail,
to wit: many of the terms used in the most matter-of-
fact way by this great assemblage of the first ladies and
gentlemen in the land would have made a Comanche
blush. Indelicacy is too mild a term to convey the
idea. However, I had read "Tom Jones," and "Rod-
erick Random," and other books of that kind, and
knew that the highest and first ladies and gentlemen in
England had remained little or no cleaner in their talk,
and in the morals and conduct which such talk implies,
clear up to a hundred years ago; in fact clear into our
own nineteenth century -- in which century, broadly
speaking, the earliest samples of the real lady and real
gentleman discoverable in English history -- or in
European history, for that matter -- may be said to
have made their appearance. Suppose Sir Walter, in-
stead of putting the conversations into the mouths of
his characters, had allowed the characters to speak for
themselves? We should have had talk from Rebecca
and Ivanhoe and the soft lady Rowena which would
embarrass a tramp in our day. However, to the uncon-
sciously indelicate all things are delicate. King Ar-
thur's people were not aware that they were indecent
and I had presence of mind enough not to mention it.

They were so troubled about my enchanted clothes
that they were mightily relieved, at last, when old
Merlin swept the difficulty away for them with a com-
mon-sense hint. He asked them why they were so dull
-- why didn't it occur to them to strip me. In half a
minute I was as naked as a pair of tongs! And dear,
dear, to think of it: I was the only embarrassed person
there. Everybody discussed me; and did it as uncon-
cernedly as if I had been a cabbage. Queen Guenever
was as naively interested as the rest, and said she had
never seen anybody with legs just like mine before. It
was the only compliment I got -- if it was a compliment.

Finally I was carried off in one direction, and my
perilous clothes in another. I was shoved into a dark
and narrow cell in a dungeon, with some scant remnants
for dinner, some moldy straw for a bed, and no end
of rats for company.


CHAPTER V.
AN INSPIRATION

I WAS so tired that even my fears were not able to
keep me awake long.

When I next came to myself, I seemed to have been
asleep a very long time. My first thought was, "Well,
what an astonishing dream I've had! I reckon I've
waked only just in time to keep from being hanged or
drowned or burned or something.... I'll nap
again till the whistle blows, and then I'll go down to
the arms factory and have it out with Hercules."

But just then I heard the harsh music of rusty chains
and bolts, a light flashed in my eyes, and that butterfly,
Clarence, stood before me! I gasped with surprise;
my breath almost got away from me.

"What!" I said, "you here yet? Go along with
the rest of the dream! scatter!"

But he only laughed, in his light-hearted way, and
fell to making fun of my sorry plight.

"All right," I said resignedly, "let the dream go
on; I'm in no hurry."

"Prithee what dream?"

"What dream? Why, the dream that I am in
Arthur's court -- a person who never existed; and that
I am talking to you, who are nothing but a work of the
imagination."

"Oh, la, indeed! and is it a dream that you're to be
burned to-morrow? Ho-ho -- answer me that!"

The shock that went through me was distressing. I
now began to reason that my situation was in the last
degree serious, dream or no dream; for I knew by past
experience of the lifelike intensity of dreams, that to
be burned to death, even in a dream, would be very far
from being a jest, and was a thing to be avoided, by
any means, fair or foul, that I could contrive. So I
said beseechingly:

"Ah, Clarence, good boy, only friend I've got, --
for you ARE my friend, aren't you? -- don't fail me; help
me to devise some way of escaping from this place!"

"Now do but hear thyself! Escape? Why, man,
the corridors are in guard and keep of men-at-arms."

"No doubt, no doubt. But how many, Clarence?
Not many, I hope?"

"Full a score. One may not hope to escape."
After a pause -- hesitatingly: "and there be other rea-
sons -- and weightier."

"Other ones? What are they?"

"Well, they say -- oh, but I daren't, indeed
daren't!"

"Why, poor lad, what is the matter? Why do you
blench? Why do you tremble so?"

"Oh, in sooth, there is need! I do want to tell you,
but --"

"Come, come, be brave, be a man -- speak out,
there's a good lad!"

He hesitated, pulled one way by desire, the other
way by fear; then he stole to the door and peeped out,
listening; and finally crept close to me and put his
mouth to my ear and told me his fearful news in a
whisper, and with all the cowering apprehension of one
who was venturing upon awful ground and speaking of
things whose very mention might be freighted with
death.

"Merlin, in his malice, has woven a spell about this
dungeon, and there bides not the man in these king-
doms that would be desperate enough to essay to cross
its lines with you! Now God pity me, I have told it!
Ah, be kind to me, be merciful to a poor boy who
means thee well; for an thou betray me I am lost!"

I laughed the only really refreshing laugh I had had
for some time; and shouted:

"Merlin has wrought a spell! MERLIN, forsooth!
That cheap old humbug, that maundering old ass?
Bosh, pure bosh, the silliest bosh in the world! Why,
it does seem to me that of all the childish, idiotic,
chuckle-headed, chicken-livered superstitions that
ev -- oh, damn Merlin!"

But Clarence had slumped to his knees before I had
half finished, and he was like to go out of his mind
with fright.

"Oh, beware! These are awful words! Any
moment these walls may crumble upon us if you say
such things. Oh call them back before it is too late!"

Now this strange exhibition gave me a good idea and
set me to thinking. If everybody about here was so
honestly and sincerely afraid of Merlin's pretended
magic as Clarence was, certainly a superior man like
me ought to be shrewd enough to contrive some way
to take advantage of such a state of things. I went
on thinking, and worked out a plan. Then I said:

"Get up. Pull yourself together; look me in the
eye. Do you know why I laughed?"

"No -- but for our blessed Lady's sake, do it no
more."

"Well, I'll tell you why I laughed. Because I'm a
magician myself."

"Thou!" The boy recoiled a step, and caught his
breath, for the thing hit him rather sudden; but the
aspect which he took on was very, very respectful. I
took quick note of that; it indicated that a humbug
didn't need to have a reputation in this asylum; people
stood ready to take him at his word, without that. I
resumed.

"I've know Merlin seven hundred years, and he --"

"Seven hun --"

"Don't interrupt me. He has died and come alive
again thirteen times, and traveled under a new name
every time: Smith, Jones, Robinson, Jackson, Peters,
Haskins, Merlin -- a new alias every time he turns up.
I knew him in Egypt three hundred years ago; I knew
him in India five hundred years ago -- he is always
blethering around in my way, everywhere I go; he
makes me tired. He don't amount to shucks, as a
magician; knows some of the old common tricks,
but has never got beyond the rudiments, and never
will. He is well enough for the provinces-- one-night
stands and that sort of thing, you know -- but dear me,
HE oughtn't to set up for an expert -- anyway not
where there's a real artist. Now look here, Clarence,
I am going to stand your friend, right along, and in re-
turn you must be mine. I want you to do me a favor.
I want you to get word to the king that I am a magician
myself -- and the Supreme Grand High-yu-Muck-
amuck and head of the tribe, at that; and I want him
to be made to understand that I am just quietly arrang-
ing a little calamity here that will make the fur fly in these
realms if Sir Kay's project is carried out and any harm
comes to me. Will you get that to the king for me?"

The poor boy was in such a state that he could
hardly answer me. It was pitiful to see a creature so
terrified, so unnerved, so demoralized. But he prom-
ised everything; and on my side he made me promise
over and over again that I would remain his friend, and
never turn against him or cast any enchantments upon
him. Then he worked his way out, staying himself
with his hand along the wall, like a sick person.

Presently this thought occurred to me: how heed-
less I have been! When the boy gets calm, he will
wonder why a great magician like me should have
begged a boy like him to help me get out of this place;
he will put this and that together, and will see that I
am a humbug.

I worried over that heedless blunder for an hour,
and called myself a great many hard names, meantime.
But finally it occurred to me all of a sudden that these
animals didn't reason; that THEY never put this and
that together; that all their talk showed that they
didn't know a discrepancy when they saw it. I was at
rest, then.

But as soon as one is at rest, in this world, off he goes
on something else to worry about. It occurred to me
that I had made another blunder: I had sent the boy
off to alarm his betters with a threat -- I intending to
invent a calamity at my leisure; now the people who are
the readiest and eagerest and willingest to swallow
miracles are the very ones who are hungriest to see you
perform them; suppose I should be called on for a
sample? Suppose I should be asked to name my
calamity? Yes, I had made a blunder; I ought to
have invented my calamity first. "What shall I do?
what can I say, to gain a little time?" I was in trouble
again; in the deepest kind of trouble:...
"There's a footstep! -- they're coming. If I had only
just a moment to think.... Good, I've got it.
I'm all right."

You see, it was the eclipse. It came into my mind
in the nick of time, how Columbus, or Cortez, or one
of those people, played an eclipse as a saving trump
once, on some savages, and I saw my chance. I could
play it myself, now, and it wouldn't be any plagiarism,
either, because I should get it in nearly a thousand
years ahead of those parties.

Clarence came in, subdued, distressed, and said:

"I hasted the message to our liege the king, and
straightway he had me to his presence. He was
frighted even to the marrow, and was minded to give
order for your instant enlargement, and that you be
clothed in fine raiment and lodged as befitted one so
great; but then came Merlin and spoiled all; for he
persuaded the king that you are mad, and know not
whereof you speak; and said your threat is but foolish-
ness and idle vaporing. They disputed long, but in the
end, Merlin, scoffing, said, 'Wherefore hath he not
NAMED his brave calamity? Verily it is because he can-
not.' This thrust did in a most sudden sort close the
king's mouth, and he could offer naught to turn the
argument; and so, reluctant, and full loth to do you
the discourtesy, he yet prayeth you to consider his per-
plexed case, as noting how the matter stands, and name
the calamity -- if so be you have determined the nature
of it and the time of its coming. Oh, prithee delay
not; to delay at such a time were to double and treble
the perils that already compass thee about. Oh, be
thou wise -- name the calamity!"

I allowed silence to accumulate while I got my im-
pressiveness together, and then said:

"How long have I been shut up in this hole?"

"Ye were shut up when yesterday was well spent
It is 9 of the morning now."

"No! Then I have slept well, sure enough. Nine
in the morning now! And yet it is the very complex-
ion of midnight, to a shade. This is the 20th, then?"

"The 20th -- yes."

"And I am to be burned alive to-morrow." The
boy shuddered.

"At what hour?"

"At high noon."

"Now then, I will tell you what to say." I paused,
and stood over that cowering lad a whole minute in
awful silence; then, in a voice deep, measured,
charged with doom, I began, and rose by dramatically
graded stages to my colossal climax, which I delivered
in as sublime and noble a way as ever I did such a
thing in my life: "Go back and tell the king that at
that hour I will smother the whole world in the dead
blackness of midnight; I will blot out the sun, and he
shall never shine again; the fruits of the earth shall
rot for lack of light and warmth, and the peoples of the
earth shall famish and die, to the last man!"

I had to carry the boy out myself, he sunk into such
a collapse. I handed him over to the soldiers, and
went back.


CHAPTER VI.
THE ECLIPSE

IN the stillness and the darkness, realization soon
began to supplement knowledge. The mere knowl-
edge of a fact is pale; but when you come to REALIZE
your fact, it takes on color. It is all the difference be-
tween hearing of a man being stabbed to the heart, and
seeing it done. In the stillness and the darkness, the
knowledge that I was in deadly danger took to itself
deeper and deeper meaning all the time; a something
which was realization crept inch by inch through my
veins and turned me cold.

But it is a blessed provision of nature that at times
like these, as soon as a man's mercury has got down to
a certain point there comes a revulsion, and he rallies.
Hope springs up, and cheerfulness along with it, and
then he is in good shape to do something for himself,
if anything can be done. When my rally came, it
came with a bound. I said to myself that my eclipse
would be sure to save me, and make me the greatest
man in the kingdom besides; and straightway my
mercury went up to the top of the tube, and my solici-
tudes all vanished. I was as happy a man as there
was in the world. I was even impatient for to-
morrow to come, I so wanted to gather in that great
triumph and be the center of all the nation's wonder
and reverence. Besides, in a business way it would be
the making of me; I knew that.

Meantime there was one thing which had got pushed
into the background of my mind. That was the half-
conviction that when the nature of my proposed
calamity should be reported to those superstitious
people, it would have such an effect that they would
want to compromise. So, by and by when I heard
footsteps coming, that thought was recalled to me, and
I said to myself, "As sure as anything, it's the com-
promise. Well, if it is good, all right, I will accept;
but if it isn't, I mean to stand my ground and play my
hand for all it is worth."

The door opened, and some men-at-arms appeared.
The leader said:

"The stake is ready. Come!"

The stake! The strength went out of me, and I
almost fell down. It is hard to get one's breath at
such a time, such lumps come into one's throat, and
such gaspings; but as soon as I could speak, I said:

"But this is a mistake -- the execution is to-
morrow."

"Order changed; been set forward a day. Haste
thee!"

I was lost. There was no help for me. I was
dazed, stupefied; I had no command over myself, I
only wandered purposely about, like one out of his
mind; so the soldiers took hold of me, and pulled me
along with them, out of the cell and along the maze of
underground corridors, and finally into the fierce glare
of daylight and the upper world. As we stepped into
the vast enclosed court of the castle I got a shock;
for the first thing I saw was the stake, standing in the
center, and near it the piled fagots and a monk. On
all four sides of the court the seated multitudes rose
rank above rank, forming sloping terraces that were
rich with color. The king and the queen sat in their
thrones, the most conspicuous figures there, of course.

To note all this, occupied but a second. The next
second Clarence had slipped from some place of con-
cealment and was pouring news into my ear, his eyes
beaming with triumph and gladness. He said:

"'Tis through ME the change was wrought! And
main hard have I worked to do it, too. But when I
revealed to them the calamity in store, and saw how
mighty was the terror it did engender, then saw I also
that this was the time to strike! Wherefore I diligently
pretended, unto this and that and the other one, that
your power against the sun could not reach its full
until the morrow; and so if any would save the sun
and the world, you must be slain to-day, while your
enchantments are but in the weaving and lack potency.
Odsbodikins, it was but a dull lie, a most indifferent
invention, but you should have seen them seize it and
swallow it, in the frenzy of their fright, as it were sal-
vation sent from heaven; and all the while was I
laughing in my sleeve the one moment, to see them so
cheaply deceived, and glorifying God the next, that
He was content to let the meanest of His creatures be
His instrument to the saving of thy life. Ah how
happy has the matter sped! You will not need to do
the sun a REAL hurt -- ah, forget not that, on your soul
forget it not! Only make a little darkness -- only the
littlest little darkness, mind, and cease with that. It
will be sufficient. They will see that I spoke falsely, --
being ignorant, as they will fancy -- and with the fall-
ing of the first shadow of that darkness you shall see
them go mad with fear; and they will set you free and
make you great! Go to thy triumph, now! But re-
member -- ah, good friend, I implore thee remember
my supplication, and do the blessed sun no hurt. For
MY sake, thy true friend."

I choked out some words through my grief and
misery; as much as to say I would spare the sun; for
which the lad's eyes paid me back with such deep and
loving gratitude that I had not the heart to tell him his
good-hearted foolishness had ruined me and sent me
to my death.

As the soldiers assisted me across the court the still-
ness was so profound that if I had been blindfold I
should have supposed I was in a solitude instead of
walled in by four thousand people. There was not a
movement perceptible in those masses of humanity;
they were as rigid as stone images, and as pale; and
dread sat upon every countenance. This hush con-
tinued while I was being chained to the stake; it still
continued while the fagots were carefully and tediously
piled about my ankles, my knees, my thighs, my body.
Then there was a pause, and a deeper hush, if possible,
and a man knelt down at my feet with a blazing torch;
the multitude strained forward, gazing, and parting
slightly from their seats without knowing it; the monk
raised his hands above my head, and his eyes toward
the blue sky, and began some words in Latin; in this
attitude he droned on and on, a little while, and then
stopped. I waited two or three moments; then looked
up; he was standing there petrified. With a common
impulse the multitude rose slowly up and stared into
the sky. I followed their eyes, as sure as guns, there
was my eclipse beginning! The life went boiling
through my veins; I was a new man! The rim of
black spread slowly into the sun's disk, my heart beat
higher and higher, and still the assemblage and the
priest stared into the sky, motionless. I knew that
this gaze would be turned upon me, next. When it
was, l was ready. I was in one of the most grand
attitudes I ever struck, with my arm stretched up
pointing to the sun. It was a noble effect. You
could SEE the shudder sweep the mass like a wave.
Two shouts rang out, one close upon the heels of the
other:

"Apply the torch!"

"I forbid it!"

The one was from Merlin, the other from the king.
Merlin started from his place -- to apply the torch
himself, I judged. I said:

"Stay where you are. If any man moves -- even
the king -- before I give him leave, I will blast him
with thunder, I will consume him with lightnings!"

The multitude sank meekly into their seats, and I was
just expecting they would. Merlin hesitated a moment
or two, and I was on pins and needles during that little
while. Then he sat down, and I took a good breath;
for I knew I was master of the situation now. The
king said:

"Be merciful, fair sir, and essay no further in this
perilous matter, lest disaster follow. It was reported
to us that your powers could not attain unto their full
strength until the morrow; but --"

"Your Majesty thinks the report may have been a
lie? It WAS a lie."

That made an immense effect; up went appealing
hands everywhere, and the king was assailed with a
storm of supplications that I might be bought off at
any price, and the calamity stayed. The king was
eager to comply. He said:

"Name any terms, reverend sir, even to the halving
of my kingdom; but banish this calamity, spare the
sun!"

My fortune was made. I would have taken him up
in a minute, but I couldn't stop an eclipse; the thing
was out of the question. So I asked time to consider.
The king said:

"How long -- ah, how long, good sir? Be merci-
ful; look, it groweth darker, moment by moment.
Prithee how long?"

"Not long. Half an hour -- maybe an hour."

There were a thousand pathetic protests, but I
couldn't shorten up any, for I couldn't remember
how long a total eclipse lasts. I was in a puzzled con-
dition, anyway, and wanted to think. Something was
wrong about that eclipse, and the fact was very un-
settling. If this wasn't the one I was after, how was
I to tell whether this was the sixth century, or nothing
but a dream? Dear me, if I could only prove it was
the latter! Here was a glad new hope. If the boy
was right about the date, and this was surely the 20th,
it WASN'T the sixth century. I reached for the monk's
sleeve, in considerable excitement, and asked him what
day of the month it was.

Hang him, he said it was the TWENTY-FIRST! It made
me turn cold to hear him. I begged him not to make
any mistake about it; but he was sure; he knew it
was the 21st. So, that feather-headed boy had botched
things again! The time of the day was right for the
eclipse; I had seen that for myself, in the beginning,
by the dial that was near by. Yes, I was in King
Arthur's court, and I might as well make the most out
of it I could.

The darkness was steadily growing, the people be-
coming more and more distressed. I now said:

"I have reflected, Sir King. For a lesson, I will
let this darkness proceed, and spread night in the
world; but whether I blot out the sun for good, or
restore it, shall rest with you. These are the terms, to
wit: You shall remain king over all your dominions,
and receive all the glories and honors that belong to
the kingship; but you shall appoint me your perpetual
minister and executive, and give me for my services
one per cent. of such actual increase of revenue over
and above its present amount as I may succeed in
creating for the state. If I can't live on that, I sha'n't
ask anybody to give me a lift. Is it satisfactory?"

There was a prodigious roar of applause, and out of
the midst of it the king's voice rose, saying:

"Away with his bonds, and set him free! and do
him homage, high and low, rich and poor, for he is
become the king's right hand, is clothed with power
and authority, and his seat is upon the highest step of
the throne! Now sweep away this creeping night, and
bring the light and cheer again, that all the world may
bless thee."

But I said:

"That a common man should be shamed before
the world, is nothing; but it were dishonor to the KING
if any that saw his minister naked should not also see
him delivered from his shame. If I might ask that my
clothes be brought again --"

"They are not meet," the king broke in. "Fetch
raiment of another sort; clothe him like a prince!"

My idea worked. I wanted to keep things as they
were till the eclipse was total, otherwise they would be
trying again to get me to dismiss the darkness, and of
course I couldn't do it. Sending for the clothes
gained some delay, but not enough. So I had to
make another excuse. I said it would be but natural
if the king should change his mind and repent to some
extent of what he had done under excitement; there-
fore I would let the darkness grow a while, and if at
the end of a reasonable time the king had kept his
mind the same, the darkness should be dismissed.
Neither the king nor anybody else was satisfied with
that arrangement, but I had to stick to my point.

It grew darker and darker and blacker and blacker,
while I struggled with those awkward sixth-century
clothes. It got to be pitch dark, at last, and the
multitude groaned with horror to feel the cold uncanny
night breezes fan through the place and see the stars
come out and twinkle in the sky. At last the eclipse
was total, and I was very glad of it, but everybody
else was in misery; which was quite natural. I said:

"The king, by his silence, still stands to the terms."
Then I lifted up my hands -- stood just so a moment --
then I said, with the most awful solemnity: "Let the
enchantment dissolve and pass harmless away!"

There was no response, for a moment, in that deep
darkness and that graveyard hush. But when the
silver rim of the sun pushed itself out, a moment or
two later, the assemblage broke loose with a vast shout
and came pouring down like a deluge to smother me
with blessings and gratitude; and Clarence was not the
last of the wash, to be sure.


CHAPTER VII.
MERLIN'S TOWER

INASMUCH as I was now the second personage in
the Kingdom, as far as political power and author-
ty were concerned, much was made of me. My
raiment was of silks and velvets and cloth of gold,
and by consequence was very showy, also uncomfort-
able. But habit would soon reconcile me to my clothes;
I was aware of that. I was given the choicest suite of
apartments in the castle, after the king's. They were
aglow with loud-colored silken hangings, but the stone
floors had nothing but rushes on them for a carpet,
and they were misfit rushes at that, being not all of
one breed. As for conveniences, properly speaking,
there weren't any. I mean LITTLE conveniences; it is
the little conveniences that make the real comfort of
life. The big oaken chairs, graced with rude carvings,
were well enough, but that was the stopping place.
There was no soap, no matches, no looking-glass -- ex-
cept a metal one, about as powerful as a pail of water.
And not a chromo. I had been used to chromos for
years, and I saw now that without my suspecting it a
passion for art had got worked into the fabric of my
being, and was become a part of me. It made me
homesick to look around over this proud and gaudy
but heartless barrenness and remember that in our house
in East Hartford, all unpretending as it was, you couldn't
go into a room but you would find an insurance-chromo,
or at least a three-color God-Bless-Our-Home over the
door; and in the parlor we had nine. But here, even
in my grand room of state, there wasn't anything in
the nature of a picture except a thing the size of a
bedquilt, which was either woven or knitted (it had
darned places in it), and nothing in it was the right
color or the right shape; and as for proportions, even
Raphael himself couldn't have botched them more
formidably, after all his practice on those nightmares
they call his "celebrated Hampton Court cartoons."
Raphael was a bird. We had several of his chromos;
one was his "Miraculous Draught of Fishes," where
he puts in a miracle of his own -- puts three men into
a canoe which wouldn't have held a dog without up-
setting. I always admired to study R.'s art, it was so
fresh and unconventional.

There wasn't even a bell or a speaking-tube in the
castle. I had a great many servants, and those that
were on duty lolled in the anteroom; and when I
wanted one of them I had to go and call for him.
There was no gas, there were no candles; a bronze
dish half full of boarding-house butter with a blazing
rag floating in it was the thing that produced what was
regarded as light. A lot of these hung along the walls
and modified the dark, just toned it down enough to
make it dismal. If you went out at night, your ser-
vants carried torches. There were no books, pens,
paper or ink, and no glass in the openings they be-
lieved to be windows. It is a little thing -- glass is --
until it is absent, then it becomes a big thing. But
perhaps the worst of all was, that there wasn't any
sugar, coffee, tea, or tobacco. I saw that I was just
another Robinson Crusoe cast away on an uninhabited
island, with no society but some more or less tame
animals, and if I wanted to make life bearable I must
do as he did -- invent, contrive, create, reorganize
things; set brain and hand to work, and keep them
busy. Well, that was in my line.

One thing troubled me along at first -- the immense
interest which people took in me. Apparently the
whole nation wanted a look at me. It soon transpired
that the eclipse had scared the British world almost to
death; that while it lasted the whole country, from one
end to the other, was in a pitiable state of panic, and
the churches, hermitages, and monkeries overflowed
with praying and weeping poor creatures who thought
the end of the world was come. Then had followed
the news that the producer of this awful event was a
stranger, a mighty magician at Arthur's court; that he
could have blown out the sun like a candle, and was
just going to do it when his mercy was purchased, and
he then dissolved his enchantments, and was now
recognized and honored as the man who had by his
unaided might saved the globe from destruction and
its peoples from extinction. Now if you consider that
everybody believed that, and not only believed it, but
never even dreamed of doubting it, you will easily
understand that there was not a person in all Britain
that would not have walked fifty miles to get a sight of
me. Of course I was all the talk -- all other subjects
were dropped; even the king became suddenly a per-
son of minor interest and notoriety. Within twenty-
four hours the delegations began to arrive, and from
that time onward for a fortnight they kept coming.
The village was crowded, and all the countryside. I
had to go out a dozen times a day and show myself to
these reverent and awe-stricken multitudes. It came
to be a great burden, as to time and trouble, but of
course it was at the same time compensatingly agree-
able to be so celebrated and such a center of homage.
It turned Brer Merlin green with envy and spite, which
was a great satisfaction to me. But there was one
thing I couldn't understand -- nobody had asked for
an autograph. I spoke to Clarence about it. By
George! I had to explain to him what it was. Then
he said nobody in the country could read or write but
a few dozen priests. Land! think of that.

There was another thing that troubled me a little.
Those multitudes presently began to agitate for another
miracle. That was natural. To be able to carry back
to their far homes the boast that they had seen the
man who could command the sun, riding in the
heavens, and be obeyed, would make them great in
the eyes of their neighbors, and envied by them all;
but to be able to also say they had seen him work a
miracle themselves -- why, people would come a dis-
tance to see THEM. The pressure got to be pretty
strong. There was going to be an eclipse of the
moon, and I knew the date and hour, but it was too
far away. Two years. I would have given a good
deal for license to hurry it up and use it now when
there was a big market for it. It seemed a great pity
to have it wasted so, and come lagging along at a time
when a body wouldn't have any use for it, as like as
not. If it had been booked for only a month away, I
could have sold it short; but, as matters stood, I
couldn't seem to cipher out any way to make it do me
any good, so I gave up trying. Next, Clarence found
that old Merlin was making himself busy on the sly
among those people. He was spreading a report that
I was a humbug, and that the reason I didn't accom-
modate the people with a miracle was because I
couldn't. I saw that I must do something. I pres-
ently thought out a plan.

By my authority as executive I threw Merlin into
prison -- the same cell I had occupied myself. Then
I gave public notice by herald and trumpet that I
should be busy with affairs of state for a fortnight, but
about the end of that time I would take a moment's
leisure and blow up Merlin's stone tower by fires from
heaven; in the meantime, whoso listened to evil re-
ports about me, let him beware. Furthermore, I
would perform but this one miracle at this time, and
no more; if it failed to satisfy and any murmured, I
would turn the murmurers into horses, and make them
useful. Quiet ensued.

I took Clarence into my confidence, to a certain
degree, and we went to work privately. I told him
that this was a sort of miracle that required a trifle of
preparation, and that it would be sudden death to ever
talk about these preparations to anybody. That made
his mouth safe enough. Clandestinely we made a few
bushels of first-rate blasting powder, and I superin-
tended my armorers while they constructed a lightning-
rod and some wires. This old stone tower was very
massive -- and rather ruinous, too, for it was Roman,
and four hundred years old. Yes, and handsome,
after a rude fashion, and clothed with ivy from base to
summit, as with a shirt of scale mail. It stood on a
lonely eminence, in good view from the castle, and
about half a mile away.

Working by night, we stowed the powder in the
tower -- dug stones out, on the inside, and buried the
powder in the walls themselves, which were fifteen feet
thick at the base. We put in a peck at a time, in a
dozen places. We could have blown up the Tower of
London with these charges. When the thirteenth night
was come we put up our lightning-rod, bedded it in
one of the batches of powder, and ran wires from it to
the other batches. Everybody had shunned that
locality from the day of my proclamation, but on the
morning of the fourteenth I thought best to warn the
people, through the heralds, to keep clear away -- a
quarter of a mile away. Then added, by command,
that at some time during the twenty-four hours I
would consummate the miracle, but would first give a
brief notice; by flags on the castle towers if in the
daytime, by torch-baskets in the same places if at
night.

Thunder-showers had been tolerably frequent of late,
and I was not much afraid of a failure; still, I shouldn't
have cared for a delay of a day or two; I should have
explained that I was busy with affairs of state yet, and
the people must wait.

Of course, we had a blazing sunny day -- almost the
first one without a cloud for three weeks; things always
happen so. I kept secluded, and watched the weather.
Clarence dropped in from time to time and said the
public excitement was growing and growing all the
time, and the whole country filling up with human
masses as far as one could see from the battlements.
At last the wind sprang up and a cloud appeared -- in
the right quarter, too, and just at nightfall. For a
little while I watched that distant cloud spread and
blacken, then I judged it was time for me to appear.
I ordered the torch-baskets to be lit, and Merlin liber-
ated and sent to me. A quarter of an hour later I
ascended the parapet and there found the king and the
court assembled and gazing off in the darkness toward
Merlin's Tower. Already the darkness was so heavy
that one could not see far; these people and the old
turrets, being partly in deep shadow and partly in the
red glow from the great torch-baskets overhead, made
a good deal of a picture.

Merlin arrived in a gloomy mood. I said:

"You wanted to burn me alive when I had not done
you any harm, and latterly you have been trying to
injure my professional reputation. Therefore I am
going to call down fire and blow up your tower, but
it is only fair to give you a chance; now if you think
you can break my enchantments and ward off the fires,
step to the bat, it's your innings."

"I can, fair sir, and I will. Doubt it not."

He drew an imaginary circle on the stones of the
roof, and burnt a pinch of powder in it, which sent up
a small cloud of aromatic smoke, whereat everybody
fell back and began to cross themselves and get un-
comfortable. Then he began to mutter and make
passes in the air with his hands. He worked himself
up slowly and gradually into a sort of frenzy, and got
to thrashing around with his arms like the sails of a
windmill. By this time the storm had about reached
us; the gusts of wind were flaring the torches and
making the shadows swash about, the first heavy drops
of rain were falling, the world abroad was black as
pitch, the lightning began to wink fitfully. Of course,
my rod would be loading itself now. In fact, things
were imminent. So I said:

"You have had time enough. I have given you
every advantage, and not interfered. It is plain your
magic is weak. It is only fair that I begin now."

I made about three passes in the air, and then there
was an awful crash and that old tower leaped into the
sky in chunks, along with a vast volcanic fountain of
fire that turned night to noonday, and showed a thou-
sand acres of human beings groveling on the ground in
a general collapse of consternation. Well, it rained
mortar and masonry the rest of the week. This was
the report; but probably the facts would have modi-
fied it.

It was an effective miracle. The great bothersome
temporary population vanished. There were a good
many thousand tracks in the mud the next morning,
but they were all outward bound. If I had advertised
another miracle I couldn't have raised an audience
with a sheriff.

Merlin's stock was flat. The king wanted to stop
his wages; he even wanted to banish him, but I inter-
fered. I said he would be useful to work the weather,
and attend to small matters like that, and I would give
him a lift now and then when his poor little parlor-
magic soured on him. There wasn't a rag of his tower
left, but I had the government rebuild it for him, and
advised him to take boarders; but he was too high-
toned for that. And as for being grateful, he never
even said thank you. He was a rather hard lot, take
him how you might; but then you couldn't fairly ex-
pect a man to be sweet that had been set back so.


CHAPTER VIII.
THE BOSS

TO be vested with enormous authority is a fine
thing; but to have the on-looking world consent
to it is a finer. The tower episode solidified my
power, and made it impregnable. If any were per-
chance disposed to be jealous and critical before that,
they experienced a change of heart, now. There was
not any one in the kingdom who would have considered
it good judgment to meddle with my matters.

I was fast getting adjusted to my situation and cir-
cumstances. For a time, I used to wake up, mornings,
and smile at my "dream," and listen for the Colt's
factory whistle; but that sort of thing played itself
out, gradually, and at last I was fully able to realize
that I was actually living in the sixth century, and in
Arthur's court, not a lunatic asylum. After that, I
was just as much at home in that century as I could
have been in any other; and as for preference, I
wouldn't have traded it for the twentieth. Look at
the opportunities here for a man of knowledge, brains,
pluck, and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the
country. The grandest field that ever was; and all my
own; not a competitor; not a man who wasn't a baby
to me in acquirements and capacities; whereas, what
would I amount to in the twentieth century? I should
be foreman of a factory, that is about all; and could
drag a seine down street any day and catch a hundred
better men than myself.

What a jump I had made! I couldn't keep from
thinking about it, and contemplating it, just as one
does who has struck oil. There was nothing back of
me that could approach it, unless it might be Joseph's
case; and Joseph's only approached it, it didn't equal
it, quite. For it stands to reason that as Joseph's
splendid financial ingenuities advantaged nobody but
the king, the general public must have regarded him
with a good deal of disfavor, whereas I had done my
entire public a kindness in sparing the sun, and was
popular by reason of it.

I was no shadow of a king; I was the substance;
the king himself was the shadow. My power was
colossal; and it was not a mere name, as such things
have generally been, it was the genuine article. I
stood here, at the very spring and source of the second
great period of the world's history; and could see the
trickling stream of that history gather and deepen and
broaden, and roll its mighty tides down the far
centuries; and I could note the upspringing of adven-
turers like myself in the shelter of its long array of
thrones: De Montforts, Gavestons, Mortimers, Villier-
ses; the war-making, campaign-directing wantons of
France, and Charles the Second's scepter-wielding
drabs; but nowhere in the procession was my full-
sized fellow visible. I was a Unique; and glad to
know that that fact could not be dislodged or chal-
lenged for thirteen centuries and a half, for sure.
Yes, in power I was equal to the king. At the same
time there was another power that was a trifle stronger
than both of us put together. That was the Church.
I do not wish to disguise that fact. I couldn't, if I
wanted to. But never mind about that, now; it will
show up, in its proper place, later on. It didn't cause
me any trouble in the beginning -- at least any of
consequence.

Well, it was a curious country, and full of interest.
And the people! They were the quaintest and sim-
plest and trustingest race; why, they were nothing but
rabbits. It was pitiful for a person born in a whole-
some free atmosphere to listen to their humble and
hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and
Church and nobility; as if they had any more occasion
to love and honor king and Church and noble than a
slave has to love and honor the lash, or a dog has to
love and honor the stranger that kicks him! Why,
dear me,ANY kind of royalty, howsoever modified,
ANY kind of aristocracy, howsoever pruned, is rightly
an insult; but if you are born and brought up under
that sort of arrangement you probably never find it
out for yourself, and don't believe it when somebody
else tells you. It is enough to make a body ashamed
of his race to think of the sort of froth that has
always occupied its thrones without shadow of right
or reason, and the seventh-rate people that have always
figured as its aristocracies -- a company of monarchs
and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only
poverty and obscurity if left, like their betters, to their
own exertions.

The most of King Arthur's British nation were
slaves, pure and simple, and bore that name, and wore
the iron collar on their necks; and the rest were slaves
in fact, but without the name; they imagined them-
selves men and freemen, and called themselves so.
The truth was, the nation as a body was in the world
for one object, and one only: to grovel before king
and Church and noble; to slave for them, sweat blood
for them, starve that they might be fed, work that they
might play, drink misery to the dregs that they might
be happy, go naked that they might wear silks and
jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from pay-
ing them, be familiar all their lives with the degrading
language and postures of adulation that they might
walk in pride and think themselves the gods of this
world. And for all this, the thanks they got were
cuffs and contempt; and so poor-spirited were they
that they took even this sort of attention as an honor.

Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting
to observe and examine. I had mine, the king and his
people had theirs. In both cases they flowed in ruts
worn deep by time and habit, and the man who should
have proposed to divert them by reason and argument
would have had a long contract on his hands. For
instance, those people had inherited the idea that all
men without title and a long pedigree, whether they
had great natural gifts and acquirements or hadn't,
were creatures of no more consideration than so many
animals, bugs, insects; whereas I had inherited the
idea that human daws who can consent to masquerade
in the peacock-shams of inherited dignities and un-
earned titles, are of no good but to be laughed at.
The way I was looked upon was odd, but it was
natural. You know how the keeper and the public
regard the elephant in the menagerie: well, that is the
idea. They are full of admiration of his vast bulk and
his prodigious strength; they speak with pride of the
fact that he can do a hundred marvels which are far
and away beyond their own powers; and they speak
with the same pride of the fact that in his wrath he is
able to drive a thousand men before him. But does
that make him one of THEM? No; the raggedest
tramp in the pit would smile at the idea. He couldn't
comprehend it; couldn't take it in; couldn't in any
remote way conceive of it. Well, to the king, the
nobles, and all the nation, down to the very slaves
and tramps, I was just that kind of an elephant, and
nothing more. I was admired, also feared; but it
was as an animal is admired and feared. The animal
is not reverenced, neither was I; I was not even re-
spected. I had no pedigree, no inherited title; so
in the king's and nobles' eyes I was mere dirt; the
people regarded me with wonder and awe, but there
was no reverence mixed with it; through the force of
inherited ideas they were not able to conceive of any-
thing being entitled to that except pedigree and lord-
ship. There you see the hand of that awful power,
the Roman Catholic Church. In two or three little
centuries it had converted a nation of men to a nation
of worms. Before the day of the Church's supremacy
in the world, men were men, and held their heads up,
and had a man's pride and spirit and independence;
and what of greatness and position a person got, he
got mainly by achievement, not by birth. But then
the Church came to the front, with an axe to grind;
and she was wise, subtle, and knew more than one
way to skin a cat -- or a nation; she invented "divine
right of kings," and propped it all around, brick by
brick, with the Beatitudes -- wrenching them from
their good purpose to make them fortify an evil one;
she preached (to the commoner) humility, obedience
to superiors, the beauty of self-sacrifice; she preached
(to the commoner) meekness under insult; preached
(still to the commoner, always to the commoner) pa-
tience, meanness of spirit, non-resistance under op-
pression; and she introduced heritable ranks and
aristocracies, and taught all the Christian populations
of the earth to bow down to them and worship them.
Even down to my birth-century that poison was still in
the blood of Christendom, and the best of English com-
moners was still content to see his inferiors impudently
continuing to hold a number of positions, such as lord-
ships and the throne, to which the grotesque laws of
his country did not allow him to aspire; in fact, he
was not merely contented with this strange condition
of things, he was even able to persuade himself that
he was proud of it. It seems to show that there isn't
anything you can't stand, if you are only born and
bred to it. Of course that taint, that reverence for
rank and title, had been in our American blood, too --
I know that; but when I left America it had disap-
peared -- at least to all intents and purposes. The
remnant of it was restricted to the dudes and dudesses.
When a disease has worked its way down to that level,
it may fairly be said to be out of the system.

But to return to my anomalous position in King
Arthur's kingdom. Here I was, a giant among pig-
mies, a man among children, a master intelligence
among intellectual moles: by all rational measurement
the one and only actually great man in that whole
British world; and yet there and then, just as in the
remote England of my birth-time, the sheep-witted
earl who could claim long descent from a king's leman,
acquired at second-hand from the slums of London,
was a better man than I was. Such a personage was
fawned upon in Arthur's realm and reverently looked
up to by everybody, even though his dispositions were
as mean as his intelligence, and his morals as base as
his lineage. There were times when HE could sit down
in the king's presence, but I couldn't. I could have
got a title easily enough, and that would have raised
me a large step in everybody's eyes; even in the
king's, the giver of it. But I didn't ask for it; and I
declined it when it was offered. I couldn't have enjoyed
such a thing with my notions; and it wouldn't have
been fair, anyway, because as far back as I could go,
our tribe had always been short of the bar sinister. I
couldn't have felt really and satisfactorily fine and
proud and set-up over any title except one that should
come from the nation itself, the only legitimate source;
and such an one I hoped to win; and in the course of
years of honest and honorable endeavor, I did win it
and did wear it with a high and clean pride. This
title fell casually from the lips of a blacksmith, one
day, in a village, was caught up as a happy thought
and tossed from mouth to mouth with a laugh and an
affirmative vote; in ten days it had swept the kingdom,
and was become as familiar as the king's name. I
was never known by any other designation afterward,
whether in the nation's talk or in grave debate upon
matters of state at the council-board of the sovereign.
This title, translated into modern speech, would be
THE BOSS. Elected by the nation. That suited me.
And it was a pretty high title. There were very few
THE'S, and I was one of them. If you spoke of the
duke, or the earl, or the bishop, how could anybody
tell which one you meant? But if you spoke of The
King or The Queen or The Boss, it was different.

Well, I liked the king, and as king I respected him
-- respected the office; at least respected it as much as
I was capable of respecting any unearned supremacy;
but as MEN I looked down upon him and his nobles --
privately. And he and they liked me, and respected
my office; but as an animal, without birth or sham
title, they looked down upon me -- and were not par-
ticularly private about it, either. I didn't charge for
my opinion about them, and they didn't charge for
their opinion about me: the account was square, the
books balanced, everybody was satisfied.


CHAPTER IX.
THE TOURNAMENT

THEY were always having grand tournaments there
at Camelot; and very stirring and picturesque
and ridiculous human bull-fights they were, too, but
just a little wearisome to the practical mind. How-
ever, I was generally on hand -- for two reasons: a
man must not hold himself aloof from the things which
his friends and his community have at heart if he
would be liked -- especially as a statesman; and both
as business man and statesman I wanted to study the
tournament and see if I couldn't invent an improve-
ment on it. That reminds me to remark, in passing,
that the very first official thing I did, in my adminis-
tration -- and it was on the very first day of it, too --
was to start a patent office; for I knew that a country
without a patent office and good patent laws was just
a crab, and couldn't travel any way but sideways or
backways.

Things ran along, a tournament nearly every week;
and now and then the boys used to want me to take a
hand -- I mean Sir Launcelot and the rest -- but I
said I would by and by; no hurry yet, and too much
government machinery to oil up and set to rights and
start a-going.

We had one tournament which was continued from
day to day during more than a week, and as many as
five hundred knights took part in it, from first to last.
They were weeks gathering. They came on horseback
from everywhere; from the very ends of the country,
and even from beyond the sea; and many brought
ladies, and all brought squires and troops of servants.
It was a most gaudy and gorgeous crowd, as to cos-
tumery, and very characteristic of the country and the
time, in the way of high animal spirits, innocent inde-
cencies of language, and happy-hearted indifference to
morals. It was fight or look on, all day and every
day; and sing, gamble, dance, carouse half the night
every night. They had a most noble good time. You
never saw such people. Those banks of beautiful
ladies, shining in their barbaric splendors, would see
a knight sprawl from his horse in the lists with a lance-
shaft the thickness of your ankle clean through him
and the blood spouting, and instead of fainting they
would clap their hands and crowd each other for a
better view; only sometimes one would dive into her
handkerchief, and look ostentatiously broken-hearted,
and then you could lay two to one that there was a
scandal there somewhere and she was afraid the public
hadn't found it out.

The noise at night would have been annoying to me
ordinarily, but I didn't mind it in the present circum-
stances, because it kept me from hearing the quacks
detaching legs and arms from the day's cripples.
They ruined an uncommon good old cross-cut saw for
me, and broke the saw-buck, too, but I let it pass.
And as for my axe -- well, I made up my mind that
the next time I lent an axe to a surgeon I would pick
my century.

I not only watched this tournament from day to day,
but detailed an intelligent priest from my Department
of Public Morals and Agriculture, and ordered him to
report it; for it was my purpose by and by, when I
should have gotten the people along far enough, to
start a newspaper. The first thing you want in a new
country, is a patent office; then work up your school
system; and after that, out with your paper. A
newspaper has its faults, and plenty of them, but no
matter, it's hark from the tomb for a dead nation, and
don't you forget it. You can't resurrect a dead nation
without it; there isn't any way. So I wanted to
sample things, and be finding out what sort of reporter-
material I might be able to rake together out of the
sixth century when I should come to need it.

Well, the priest did very well, considering. He got
in all the details, and that is a good thing in a local
item: you see, he had kept books for the undertaker-
department of his church when he was younger,
and there, you know, the money's in the details; the
more details, the more swag: bearers, mutes, candles,
prayers -- everything counts; and if the bereaved don't
buy prayers enough you mark up your candles with a
forked pencil, and your bill shows up all right. And
he had a good knack at getting in the complimentary
thing here and there about a knight that was likely to
advertise -- no, I mean a knight that had influence;
and he also had a neat gift of exaggeration, for in his
time he had kept door for a pious hermit who lived in
a sty and worked miracles.

Of course this novice's report lacked whoop and
crash and lurid description, and therefore wanted the
true ring; but its antique wording was quaint and
sweet and simple, and full of the fragrances and flavors
of the time, and these little merits made up in a meas-
ure for its more important lacks. Here is an extract
from it:

  Then Sir Brian de les Isles and Grummore Grummorsum,
  knights of the castle, encountered with Sir Aglovale and
  Sir Tor, and Sir Tor smote down Sir Grummore Grummorsum
  to the earth. Then came Sir Carados of the dolorous
  tower, and Sir Turquine, knights of the castle, and
  there encountered with them Sir Percivale de Galis
  and Sir Lamorak de Galis, that were two brethren, and
  there encountered Sir Percivale with Sir Carados, and
  either brake their spears unto their hands, and then
  Sir Turquine with Sir Lamorak, and either of them smote
  down other, horse and all, to the earth, and either
  parties rescued other and horsed them again. And Sir
  Arnold, and Sir Gauter, knights of the castle,
  encountered with Sir Brandiles and Sir Kay, and these
  four knights encountered mightily, and brake their
  spears to their hands. Then came Sir Pertolope from
  the castle, and there encountered with him Sir Lionel,
  and there Sir Pertolope the green knight smote down Sir
  Lionel, brother to Sir Launcelot. All this was marked
  by noble heralds, who bare him best, and their names.
  Then Sir Bleobaris brake his spear upon Sir Gareth,
  but of that stroke Sir Bleobaris fell to the earth.
  When Sir Galihodin saw that, he bad Sir Gareth keep him,
  and Sir Gareth smote him to the earth. Then Sir Galihud
  gat a spear to avenge his brother, and in the same wise
  Sir Gareth served him, and Sir Dinadan and his brother
  La Cote Male Taile, and Sir Sagramore le Disirous, and
  Sir Dodinas le Savage; all these he bare down with one
  spear. When King Aswisance of Ireland saw Sir Gareth
  fare so he marvelled what he might be, that one time
  seemed green, and another time, at his again coming,
  he seemed blue. And thus at every course that he rode
  to and fro he changed his color, so that there might
  neither king nor knight have ready cognizance of him.
  Then Sir Agwisance the King of Ireland encountered
  with Sir Gareth, and there Sir Gareth smote him from
  his horse, saddle and all. And then came King Carados
  of Scotland, and Sir Gareth smote him down horse and
  man. And in the same wise he served King Uriens of the
  land of Gore. And then there came in Six Bagdemagus,
  and Sir Gareth smote him down horse and man to the
  earth. And Bagdemagus's son Meliganus brake a spear
  upon Sir Gareth mightily and knightly. And then Sir
  Galahault the noble prince cried on high, Knight with
  the many colors, well hast thou justed; now make thee
  ready that I may just with thee. Sir Gareth heard him,
  and he gat a great spear, and so they encountered
  together, and there the prince brake his spear; but Sir
  Gareth smote him upon the left side of the helm, that
  he reeled here and there, and he had fallen down had not
  his men recovered him. Truly, said King Arthur, that
  knight with the many colors is a good knight. Wherefore
  the king called unto him Sir Launcelot, and prayed him
  to encounter with that knight. Sir, said Launcelot, I
  may as well find in my heart for to forbear him at
  this time, for he hath had travail enough this day, and
  when a good knight doth so well upon some day, it is
  no good knight's part to let him of his worship, and,
  namely, when he seeth a knight hath done so great
  labour; for peradventure, said Sir Launcelot, his
  quarrel is here this day, and peradventure he is best
  beloved with this lady of all that be here, for I see
  well he paineth himself and enforceth him to do great
  deeds, and therefore, said Sir Launcelot, as for me,
  this day he shall have the honour; though it lay in my
  power to put him from it, I would not.

There was an unpleasant little episode that day,
which for reasons of state I struck out of my priest's
report. You will have noticed that Garry was doing
some great fighting in the engagement. When I say
Garry I mean Sir Gareth. Garry was my private pet
name for him; it suggests that I had a deep affection
for him, and that was the case. But it was a private
pet name only, and never spoken aloud to any one,
much less to him; being a noble, he would not have
endured a familiarity like that from me. Well, to pro-
ceed: I sat in the private box set apart for me as the
king's minister. While Sir Dinadan was waiting for
his turn to enter the lists, he came in there and sat
down and began to talk; for he was always making up
to me, because I was a stranger and he liked to have a
fresh market for his jokes, the most of them having
reached that stage of wear where the teller has to do
the laughing himself while the other person looks sick.
I had always responded to his efforts as well as I
could, and felt a very deep and real kindness for him,
too, for the reason that if by malice of fate he knew
the one particular anecdote which I had heard oftenest
and had most hated and most loathed all my life, he
had at least spared it me. It was one which I had
heard attributed to every humorous person who had
ever stood on American soil, from Columbus down to
Artemus Ward. It was about a humorous lecturer
who flooded an ignorant audience with the killingest
jokes for an hour and never got a laugh; and then
when he was leaving, some gray simpletons wrung him
gratefully by the hand and said it had been the funniest
thing they had ever heard, and "it was all they could
do to keep from laughin' right out in meetin'." That
anecdote never saw the day that it was worth the telling;
and yet I had sat under the telling of it hundreds and
thousands and millions and billions of times, and cried
and cursed all the way through. Then who can hope
to know what my feelings were, to hear this armor-
plated ass start in on it again, in the murky twilight of
tradition, before the dawn of history, while even
Lactantius might be referred to as "the late Lactan-
tius," and the Crusades wouldn't be born for five
hundred years yet? Just as he finished, the call-boy
came; so, haw-hawing like a demon, he went rattling
and clanking out like a crate of loose castings, and I
knew nothing more. It was some minutes before I
came to, and then I opened my eyes just in time to
see Sir Gareth fetch him an awful welt, and I uncon-
sciously out with the prayer, "I hope to gracious he's
killed!" But by ill-luck, before I had got half through
with the words, Sir Gareth crashed into Sir Sagramor
le Desirous and sent him thundering over his horse's
crupper, and Sir Sagramor caught my remark and
thought I meant it for HIM.

Well, whenever one of those people got a thing into
his head, there was no getting it out again. I knew
that, so I saved my breath, and offered no explana-
tions. As soon as Sir Sagramor got well, he notified
me that there was a little account to settle between us,
and he named a day three or four years in the future;
place of settlement, the lists where the offense had
been given. I said I would be ready when he got
back. You see, he was going for the Holy Grail.
The boys all took a flier at the Holy Grail now and
then. It was a several years' cruise. They always
put in the long absence snooping around, in the most
conscientious way, though none of them had any idea
where the Holy Grail really was, and I don't think any
of them actually expected to find it, or would have
known what to do with it if he HAD run across it.
You see, it was just the Northwest Passage of that
day, as you may say; that was all. Every year expe-
ditions went out holy grailing, and next year relief
expeditions went out to hunt for THEM. There was
worlds of reputation in it, but no money. Why, they
actually wanted ME to put in! Well, I should smile.


CHAPTER X.
BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION

THE Round Table soon heard of the challenge, and
of course it was a good deal discussed, for such
things interested the boys. The king thought I ought
now to set forth in quest of adventures, so that I
might gain renown and be the more worthy to meet
Sir Sagramor when the several years should have rolled
away. I excused myself for the present; I said it
would take me three or four years yet to get things
well fixed up and going smoothly; then I should be
ready; all the chances were that at the end of that
time Sir Sagramor would still be out grailing, so no
valuable time would be lost by the postponement; I
should then have been in office six or seven years,
and I believed my system and machinery would be so
well developed that I could take a holiday without its
working any harm.

I was pretty well satisfied with what I had already
accomplished. In various quiet nooks and corners I
had the beginnings of all sorts of industries under way
-- nuclei of future vast factories, the iron and steel
missionaries of my future civilization. In these were
gathered together the brightest young minds I could
find, and I kept agents out raking the country for
more, all the time. I was training a crowd of ignorant
folk into experts -- experts in every sort of handiwork
and scientific calling. These nurseries of mine went
smoothly and privately along undisturbed in their ob-
scure country retreats, for nobody was allowed to
come into their precincts without a special permit --
for I was afraid of the Church.

I had started a teacher-factory and a lot of Sunday-
schools the first thing; as a result, I now had an ad-
mirable system of graded schools in full blast in those
places, and also a complete variety of Protestant con-
gregations all in a prosperous and growing condition.
Everybody could be any kind of a Christian he wanted
to; there was perfect freedom in that matter. But I
confined public religious teaching to the churches and
the Sunday-schools, permitting nothing of it in my
other educational buildings. I could have given my
own sect the preference and made everybody a Presby-
terian without any trouble, but that would have been
to affront a law of human nature: spiritual wants and
instincts are as various in the human family as are
physical appetites, complexions, and features, and a
man is only at his best, morally, when he is equipped
with the religious garment whose color and shape and
size most nicely accommodate themselves to the spirit-
ual complexion, angularities, and stature of the indi-
vidual who wears it; and, besides, I was afraid of a
united Church; it makes a mighty power, the mightiest
conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into
selfish hands, as it is always bound to do, it means
death to human liberty and paralysis to human
thought.

All mines were royal property, and there were a
good many of them. They had formerly been worked
as savages always work mines -- holes grubbed in the
earth and the mineral brought up in sacks of hide by
hand, at the rate of a ton a day; but I had begun to
put the mining on a scientific basis as early as I could.

Yes, I had made pretty handsome progress when Sir
Sagramor's challenge struck me.

Four years rolled by -- and then! Well, you would
never imagine it in the world. Unlimited power is the
ideal thing when it is in safe hands. The despotism of
heaven is the one absolutely perfect government. An
earthly despotism would be the absolutely perfect earthly
government, if the conditions were the same, namely,
the despot the perfectest individual of the human race,
and his lease of life perpetual. But as a perishable
perfect man must die, and leave his despotism in the
hands of an imperfect successor, an earthly despotism
is not merely a bad form of government, it is the worst
form that is possible.

My works showed what a despot could do with the
resources of a kingdom at his command. Unsuspected
by this dark land, I had the civilization of the nine-
teenth century booming under its very nose! It was
fenced away from the public view, but there it was, a
gigantic and unassailable fact -- and to be heard from,
yet, if I lived and had luck. There it was, as sure a
fact and as substantial a fact as any serene volcano,
standing innocent with its smokeless summit in the
blue sky and giving no sign of the rising hell in its
bowels. My schools and churches were children four
years before; they were grown-up now; my shops of
that day were vast factories now; where I had a dozen
trained men then, I had a thousand now; where I had
one brilliant expert then, I had fifty now. I stood
with my hand on the cock, so to speak, ready to turn
it on and flood the midnight world with light at any
moment. But I was not going to do the thing in that
sudden way. It was not my policy. The people
could not have stood it; and, moreover, I should have
had the Established Roman Catholic Church on my
back in a minute.

No, I had been going cautiously all the while. I
had had confidential agents trickling through the
country some time, whose office was to undermine
knighthood by imperceptible degrees, and to gnaw a
little at this and that and the other superstition, and so
prepare the way gradually for a better order of things.
I was turning on my light one-candle-power at a time,
and meant to continue to do so.

I had scattered some branch schools secretly about
the kingdom, and they were doing very well. I meant
to work this racket more and more, as time wore on, if
nothing occurred to frighten me. One of my deepest
secrets was my West Point -- my military academy. I
kept that most jealously out of sight; and I did the
same with my naval academy which I had established
at a remote seaport. Both were prospering to my
satisfaction.

Clarence was twenty-two now, and was my head
executive, my right hand. He was a darling; he was
equal to anything; there wasn't anything he couldn't
turn his hand to. Of late I had been training him for
journalism, for the time seemed about right for a start
in the newspaper line; nothing big, but just a small
weekly for experimental circulation in my civilization-
nurseries. He took to it like a duck; there was an
editor concealed in him, sure. Already he had doubled
himself in one way; he talked sixth century and wrote
nineteenth. His journalistic style was climbing, stead-
ily; it was already up to the back settlement Alabama
mark, and couldn't be told from the editorial output of
that region either by matter or flavor.

We had another large departure on hand, too. This
was a telegraph and a telephone; our first venture in
this line. These wires were for private service only,
as yet, and must be kept private until a riper day
should come. We had a gang of men on the road,
working mainly by night. They were stringing ground
wires; we were afraid to put up poles, for they would
attract too much inquiry. Ground wires were good
enough, in both instances, for my wires were protected
by an insulation of my own invention which was per-
fect. My men had orders to strike across country,
avoiding roads, and establishing connection with any
considerable towns whose lights betrayed their pres-
ence, and leaving experts in charge. Nobody could
tell you how to find any place in the kingdom, for
nobody ever went intentionally to any place, but only
struck it by accident in his wanderings, and then gener-
ally left it without thinking to inquire what its name
was. At one time and another we had sent out topo-
graphical expeditions to survey and map the kingdom,
but the priests had always interfered and raised trouble.
So we had given the thing up, for the present; it
would be poor wisdom to antagonize the Church.

As for the general condition of the country, it was
as it had been when I arrived in it, to all intents and
purposes. I had made changes, but they were neces-
sarily slight, and they were not noticeable. Thus far,
I had not even meddled with taxation, outside of the
taxes which provided the royal revenues. I had
systematized those, and put the service on an effective
and righteous basis. As a result, these revenues were
already quadrupled, and yet the burden was so much
more equably distributed than before, that all the king-
dom felt a sense of relief, and the praises of my ad-
ministration were hearty and general.

Personally, I struck an interruption, now, but I did
not mind it, it could not have happened at a better
time. Earlier it could have annoyed me, but now
everything was in good hands and swimming right
along. The king had reminded me several times, of
late, that the postponement I had asked for, four years
before, had about run out now. It was a hint that I
ought to be starting out to seek adventures and get up
a reputation of a size to make me worthy of the honor
of breaking a lance with Sir Sagramor, who was still
out grailing, but was being hunted for by various relief
expeditions, and might be found any year, now. So
you see I was expecting this interruption; it did not
take me by surprise.


CHAPTER XI.
THE YANKEE IN SEARCH OF ADVENTURES.

THERE never was such a country for wandering
liars; and they were of both sexes. Hardly a
month went by without one of these tramps arriving;
and generally loaded with a tale about some princess
or other wanting help to get her out of some far-away
castle where she was held in captivity by a lawless
scoundrel, usually a giant. Now you would think that
the first thing the king would do after listening to such
a novelette from an entire stranger, would be to ask
for credentials -- yes, and a pointer or two as to
locality of castle, best route to it, and so on. But
nobody ever thought of so simple and common-sense
a thing at that. No, everybody swallowed these peo-
ple's lies whole, and never asked a question of any
sort or about anything. Well, one day when I was
not around, one of these people came along -- it was a
she one, this time -- and told a tale of the usual pat-
tern. Her mistress was a captive in a vast and gloomy
castle, along with forty-four other young and beautiful
girls, pretty much all of them princesses; they had
been languishing in that cruel captivity for twenty-six
years; the masters of the castle were three stupendous
brothers, each with four arms and one eye -- the eye in
the center of the forehead, and as big as a fruit. Sort of
fruit not mentioned; their usual slovenliness in statistics.

Would you believe it? The king and the whole
Round Table were in raptures over this preposterous
opportunity for adventure. Every knight of the Table
jumped for the chance, and begged for it; but to their
vexation and chagrin the king conferred it upon me,
who had not asked for it at all.

By an effort, I contained my joy when Clarence
brought me the news. But he -- he could not contain
his. His mouth gushed delight and gratitude in a
steady discharge -- delight in my good fortune, grati-
tude to the king for this splendid mark of his favor for
me. He could keep neither his legs nor his body still,
but pirouetted about the place in an airy ecstasy of
happiness.

On my side, I could have cursed the kindness that
conferred upon me this benefaction, but I kept my
vexation under the surface for policy's sake, and did
what I could to let on to be glad. Indeed, I SAID I
was glad. And in a way it was true; I was as glad as
a person is when he is scalped.

Well, one must make the best of things, and not
waste time with useless fretting, but get down to busi-
ness and see what can be done. In all lies there is
wheat among the chaff; I must get at the wheat in this
case: so I sent for the girl and she came. She was a
comely enough creature, and soft and modest, but, if
signs went for anything, she didn't know as much as a
lady's watch. I said:

"My dear, have you been questioned as to particu-
lars?"

She said she hadn't.

"Well, I didn't expect you had, but I thought I
would ask, to make sure; it's the way I've been raised.
Now you mustn't take it unkindly if I remind you that
as we don't know you, we must go a little slow. You
may be all right, of course, and we'll hope that you
are; but to take it for granted isn't business. YOU
understand that. I'm obliged to ask you a few ques-
tions; just answer up fair and square, and don't be
afraid. Where do you live, when you are at home?"

"In the land of Moder, fair sir."

"Land of Moder. I don't remember hearing of it
before. Parents living?"

"As to that, I know not if they be yet on live, sith
it is many years that I have lain shut up in the castle."

"Your name, please?"

"I hight the Demoiselle Alisande la Carteloise, an it
please you."

"Do you know anybody here who can identify you?"

"That were not likely, fair lord, I being come hither
now for the first time."

"Have you brought any letters -- any documents --
any proofs that you are trustworthy and truthful?"

"Of a surety, no; and wherefore should I? Have
I not a tongue, and cannot I say all that myself?"

"But YOUR saying it, you know, and somebody
else's saying it, is different."

"Different? How might that be? I fear me I do
not understand."

"Don't UNDERSTAND? Land of -- why, you see --
you see -- why, great Scott, can't you understand a
little thing like that? Can't you understand the
difference between your -- WHY do you look so inno-
cent and idiotic!"

"I? In truth I know not, but an it were the will of
God."

"Yes, yes, I reckon that's about the size of it.
Don't mind my seeming excited; I'm not. Let us
change the subject. Now as to this castle, with forty-
five princesses in it, and three ogres at the head of it,
tell me -- where is this harem?"

"Harem?"

"The CASTLE, you understand; where is the castle?"

"Oh, as to that, it is great, and strong, and well beseen,
and lieth in a far country. Yes, it is many leagues."

"HOW many?"

"Ah, fair sir, it were woundily hard to tell, they
are so many, and do so lap the one upon the other,
and being made all in the same image and tincted with
the same color, one may not know the one league from
its fellow, nor how to count them except they be taken
apart, and ye wit well it were God's work to do that,
being not within man's capacity; for ye will note --"

"Hold on, hold on, never mind about the distance;
WHEREABOUTS does the castle lie? What's the direction
from here?"

"Ah, please you sir, it hath no direction from
here; by reason that the road lieth not straight, but
turneth evermore; wherefore the direction of its place
abideth not, but is some time under the one sky and
anon under another, whereso if ye be minded that it is
in the east, and wend thitherward, ye shall observe that
the way of the road doth yet again turn upon itself by
the space of half a circle, and this marvel happing
again and yet again and still again, it will grieve you
that you had thought by vanities of the mind to thwart
and bring to naught the will of Him that giveth not a
castle a direction from a place except it pleaseth Him,
and if it please Him not, will the rather that even all
castles and all directions thereunto vanish out of the
earth, leaving the places wherein they tarried desolate
and vacant, so warning His creatures that where He
will He will, and where He will not He --"

"Oh, that's all right, that's all right, give us a rest;
never mind about the direction, HANG the direction -- I
beg pardon, I beg a thousand pardons, I am not well
to-day; pay no attention when I soliloquize, it is an
old habit, an old, bad habit, and hard to get rid of
when one's digestion is all disordered with eating food
that was raised forever and ever before he was born;
good land! a man can't keep his functions regular on
spring chickens thirteen hundred years old. But come
-- never mind about that; let's -- have you got such
a thing as a map of that region about you? Now a
good map --"

"Is it peradventure that manner of thing which of
late the unbelievers have brought from over the great
seas, which, being boiled in oil, and an onion and salt
added thereto, doth --"

"What, a map? What are you talking about?
Don't you know what a map is? There, there, never
mind, don't explain, I hate explanations; they fog a
thing up so that you can't tell anything about it. Run
along, dear; good-day; show her the way, Clarence."

Oh, well, it was reasonably plain, now, why these
donkeys didn't prospect these liars for details. It
may be that this girl had a fact in her somewhere, but
I don't believe you could have sluiced it out with a
hydraulic; nor got it with the earlier forms of blasting,
even; it was a case for dynamite. Why, she was a
perfect ass; and yet the king and his knights had
listened to her as if she had been a leaf out of the
gospel. It kind of sizes up the whole party. And
think of the simple ways of this court: this wandering
wench hadn't any more trouble to get access to the
king in his palace than she would have had to get into
the poorhouse in my day and country. In fact, he
was glad to see her, glad to hear her tale; with that
adventure of hers to offer, she was as welcome as a
corpse is to a coroner.

Just as I was ending-up these reflections, Clarence
came back. I remarked upon the barren result of my
efforts with the girl; hadn't got hold of a single point
that could help me to find the castle. The youth
looked a little surprised, or puzzled, or something, and
intimated that he had been wondering to himself what
I had wanted to ask the girl all those questions for.

"Why, great guns," I said, "don't I want to find
the castle? And how else would I go about it?"

"La, sweet your worship, one may lightly answer
that, I ween. She will go with thee. They always
do. She will ride with thee."

"Ride with me? Nonsense!"

"But of a truth she will. She will ride with thee.
Thou shalt see."

"What? She browse around the hills and scour the
woods with me -- alone -- and I as good as engaged to
be married? Why, it's scandalous. Think how it
would look."

My, the dear face that rose before me! The boy
was eager to know all about this tender matter. I
swore him to secresy and then whispered her name --
"Puss Flanagan." He looked disappointed, and said
he didn't remember the countess. How natural it was
for the little courtier to give her a rank. He asked me
where she lived.

"In East Har--" I came to myself and stopped,
a little confused; then I said, "Never mind, now; I'll
tell you some time."

And might he see her? Would I let him see her
some day?

It was but a little thing to promise -- thirteen hun-
dred years or so -- and he so eager; so I said Yes.
But I sighed; I couldn't help it. And yet there was
no sense in sighing, for she wasn't born yet. But that
is the way we are made: we don't reason, where we
feel; we just feel.

My expedition was all the talk that day and that
night, and the boys were very good to me, and made
much of me, and seemed to have forgotten their vexa-
tion and disappointment, and come to be as anxious
for me to hive those ogres and set those ripe old vir-
gins loose as if it were themselves that had the con-
tract. Well, they WERE good children -- but just chil-
dren, that is all. And they gave me no end of points
about how to scout for giants, and how to scoop them
in; and they told me all sorts of charms against en-
chantments, and gave me salves and other rubbish to
put on my wounds. But it never occurred to one of
them to reflect that if I was such a wonderful necro-
mancer as I was pretending to be, I ought not to need
salves or instructions, or charms against enchantments,
and, least of all, arms and armor, on a foray of any
kind -- even against fire-spouting dragons, and devils
hot from perdition, let alone such poor adversaries as
these I was after, these commonplace ogres of the
back settlements.

I was to have an early breakfast, and start at dawn,
for that was the usual way; but I had the demon's
own time with my armor, and this delayed me a little.
It is troublesome to get into, and there is so much
detail. First you wrap a layer or two of blanket around
your body, for a sort of cushion and to keep off the
cold iron; then you put on your sleeves and shirt of
chain mail -- these are made of small steel links woven
together, and they form a fabric so flexible that if you
toss your shirt onto the floor, it slumps into a pile like
a peck of wet fish-net; it is very heavy and is nearly
the uncomfortablest material in the world for a night
shirt, yet plenty used it for that -- tax collectors, and
reformers, and one-horse kings with a defective title,
and those sorts of people; then you put on your shoes
-- flat-boats roofed over with interleaving bands of
steel -- and screw your clumsy spurs into the heels.
Next you buckle your greaves on your legs, and your
cuisses on your thighs; then come your backplate and
your breastplate, and you begin to feel crowded; then
you hitch onto the breastplate the half-petticoat of
broad overlapping bands of steel which hangs down in
front but is scolloped out behind so you can sit down,
and isn't any real improvement on an inverted coal
scuttle, either for looks or for wear, or to wipe your
hands on; next you belt on your sword; then you
put your stove-pipe joints onto your arms, your iron
gauntlets onto your hands, your iron rat-trap onto
your head, with a rag of steel web hitched onto it to
hang over the back of your neck -- and there you are,
snug as a candle in a candle-mould. This is no time
to dance. Well, a man that is packed away like that
is a nut that isn't worth the cracking, there is so little
of the meat, when you get down to it, by comparison
with the shell.

The boys helped me, or I never could have got in.
Just as we finished, Sir Bedivere happened in, and I
saw that as like as not I hadn't chosen the most con-
venient outfit for a long trip. How stately he looked;
and tall and broad and grand. He had on his head a
conical steel casque that only came down to his ears,
and for visor had only a narrow steel bar that extended
down to his upper lip and protected his nose; and all
the rest of him, from neck to heel, was flexible chain
mail, trousers and all. But pretty much all of him was
hidden under his outside garment, which of course was
of chain mail, as I said, and hung straight from his
shoulders to his ankles; and from his middle to the
bottom, both before and behind, was divided, so that
he could ride and let the skirts hang down on each
side. He was going grailing, and it was just the outfit
for it, too. I would have given a good deal for that
ulster, but it was too late now to be fooling around.
The sun was just up, the king and the court were all
on hand to see me off and wish me luck; so it wouldn't
be etiquette for me to tarry. You don't get on your
horse yourself; no, if you tried it you would get dis-
appointed. They carry you out, just as they carry a
sun-struck man to the drug store, and put you on, and
help get you to rights, and fix your feet in the stirrups;
and all the while you do feel so strange and stuffy and
like somebody else -- like somebody that has been mar-
ried on a sudden, or struck by lightning, or something
like that, and hasn't quite fetched around yet, and is sort
of numb, and can't just get his bearings. Then they
stood up the mast they called a spear, in its socket by
my left foot, and I gripped it with my hand; lastly
they hung my shield around my neck, and I was all
complete and ready to up anchor and get to sea.
Everybody was as good to me as they could be, and
a maid of honor gave me the stirrup-cup her own self.
There was nothing more to do now, but for that
damsel to get up behind me on a pillion, which she
did, and put an arm or so around me to hold on.

And so we started, and everybody gave us a good-
bye and waved their handkerchiefs or helmets. And
everybody we met, going down the hill and through
the village was respectful to us, except some shabby
little boys on the outskirts. They said:

"Oh, what a guy!" And hove clods at us.

In my experience boys are the same in all ages.
They don't respect anything, they don't care for any-
thing or anybody. They say "Go up, baldhead" to
the prophet going his unoffending way in the gray of
antiquity; they sass me in the holy gloom of the
Middle Ages; and I had seen them act the same way
in Buchanan's administration; I remember, because I
was there and helped. The prophet had his bears and
settled with his boys; and I wanted to get down and
settle with mine, but it wouldn't answer, because I
couldn't have got up again. I hate a country without
a derrick.


CHAPTER XII.
SLOW TORTURE

STRAIGHT off, we were in the country. It was
most lovely and pleasant in those sylvan solitudes
in the early cool morning in the first freshness of
autumn. From hilltops we saw fair green valleys lying
spread out below, with streams winding through them,
and island groves of trees here and there, and huge
lonely oaks scattered about and casting black blots of
shade; and beyond the valleys we saw the ranges of
hills, blue with haze, stretching away in billowy per-
spective to the horizon, with at wide intervals a dim
fleck of white or gray on a wave-summit, which we
knew was a castle. We crossed broad natural lawns
sparkling with dew, and we moved like spirits, the
cushioned turf giving out no sound of footfall; we
dreamed along through glades in a mist of green light
that got its tint from the sun-drenched roof of leaves
overhead, and by our feet the clearest and coldest of
runlets went frisking and gossiping over its reefs and
making a sort of whispering music, comfortable to hear;
and at times we left the world behind and entered into
the solemn great deeps and rich gloom of the forest,
where furtive wild things whisked and scurried by and
were gone before you could even get your eye on the
place where the noise was; and where only the earliest
birds were turning out and getting to business with a
song here and a quarrel yonder and a mysterious far-
off hammering and drumming for worms on a tree trunk
away somewhere in the impenetrable remotenesses of
the woods. And by and by out we would swing again
into the glare.

About the third or fourth or fifth time that we swung
out into the glare -- it was along there somewhere, a
couple of hours or so after sun-up -- it wasn't as pleas-
ant as it had been. It was beginning to get hot. This
was quite noticeable. We had a very long pull, after
that, without any shade. Now it is curious how
progressively little frets grow and multiply after they
once get a start. Things which I didn't mind at all,
at first, I began to mind now -- and more and more,
too, all the time. The first ten or fifteen times I wanted
my handkerchief I didn't seem to care; I got along,
and said never mind, it isn't any matter, and dropped
it out of my mind. But now it was different; I wanted
it all the time; it was nag, nag, nag, right along, and
no rest; I couldn't get it out of my mind; and so at
last I lost my temper and said hang a man that would
make a suit of armor without any pockets in it. You
see I had my handkerchief in my helmet; and some
other things; but it was that kind of a helmet that you
can't take off by yourself. That hadn't occurred to
me when I put it there; and in fact I didn't know it.
I supposed it would be particularly convenient there.
And so now, the thought of its being there, so handy
and close by, and yet not get-at-able, made it all the
worse and the harder to bear. Yes, the thing that you
can't get is the thing that you want, mainly; every one
has noticed that. Well, it took my mind off from every-
thing else; took it clear off, and centered it in my
helmet; and mile after mile, there it stayed, imagining
the handkerchief, picturing the handkerchief; and it
was bitter and aggravating to have the salt sweat keep
trickling down into my eyes, and I couldn't get at it.
It seems like a little thing, on paper, but it was not a
little thing at all; it was the most real kind of misery.
I would not say it if it was not so. I made up my
mind that I would carry along a reticule next time, let
it look how it might, and people say what they would.
Of course these iron dudes of the Round Table would
think it was scandalous, and maybe raise Sheol about
it, but as for me, give me comfort first, and style after-
wards. So we jogged along, and now and then we
struck a stretch of dust, and it would tumble up in
clouds and get into my nose and make me sneeze
and cry; and of course I said things I oughtn't to
have said, I don't deny that. I am not better than
others.

We couldn't seem to meet anybody in this lone-
some Britain, not even an ogre; and, in the mood I
was in then, it was well for the ogre; that is, an
ogre with a handkerchief. Most knights would have
thought of nothing but getting his armor; but so I
got his bandanna, he could keep his hardware, for all
of me.

Meantime, it was getting hotter and hotter in there.
You see, the sun was beating down and warming up the
iron more and more all the time. Well, when you are
hot, that way, every little thing irritates you. When I
trotted, I rattled like a crate of dishes, and that annoyed
me; and moreover I couldn't seem to stand that
shield slatting and banging, now about my breast, now
around my back; and if I dropped into a walk my
joints creaked and screeched in that wearisome way that
a wheelbarrow does, and as we didn't create any breeze
at that gait, I was like to get fried in that stove; and
besides, the quieter you went the heavier the iron set-
tled down on you and the more and more tons you
seemed to weigh every minute. And you had to be
always changing hands, and passing your spear over to
the other foot, it got so irksome for one hand to hold
it long at a time.

Well, you know, when you perspire that way, in
rivers, there comes a time when you -- when you --
well, when you itch. You are inside, your hands are
outside; so there you are; nothing but iron between.
It is not a light thing, let it sound as it may. First
it is one place; then another; then some more; and
it goes on spreading and spreading, and at last the ter-
ritory is all occupied, and nobody can imagine what
you feel like, nor how unpleasant it is. And when it
had got to the worst, and it seemed to me that I could
not stand anything more, a fly got in through the bars
and settled on my nose, and the bars were stuck and
wouldn't work, and I couldn't get the visor up; and I
could only shake my head, which was baking hot by
this time, and the fly -- well, you know how a fly acts
when he has got a certainty -- he only minded the
shaking enough to change from nose to lip, and lip to
ear, and buzz and buzz all around in there, and keep
on lighting and biting, in a way that a person, already
so distressed as I was, simply could not stand. So I
gave in, and got Alisande to unship the helmet and
relieve me of it. Then she emptied the conveniences
out of it and fetched it full of water, and I drank and
then stood up, and she poured the rest down inside the
armor. One cannot think how refreshing it was. She
continued to fetch and pour until I was well soaked
and thoroughly comfortable.

It was good to have a rest -- and peace. But nothing
is quite perfect in this life, at any time. I had made a
pipe a while back, and also some pretty fair tobacco;
not the real thing, but what some of the Indians use:
the inside bark of the willow, dried. These comforts
had been in the helmet, and now I had them again, but
no matches.

Gradually, as the time wore along, one annoying fact
was borne in upon my understanding -- that we were
weather-bound. An armed novice cannot mount his
horse without help and plenty of it. Sandy was not
enough; not enough for me, anyway. We had to wait
until somebody should come along. Waiting, in
silence, would have been agreeable enough, for I was
full of matter for reflection, and wanted to give it a
chance to work. I wanted to try and think out how it
was that rational or even half-rational men could ever
have learned to wear armor, considering its incon-
veniences; and how they had managed to keep up such
a fashion for generations when it was plain that what I
had suffered to-day they had had to suffer all the days
of their lives. I wanted to think that out; and more-
over I wanted to think out some way to reform this
evil and persuade the people to let the foolish fashion
die out; but thinking was out of the question in the
circumstances. You couldn't think, where Sandy
was.

She was a quite biddable creature and good-hearted,
but she had a flow of talk that was as steady as a mill,
and made your head sore like the drays and wagons in
a city. If she had had a cork she would have been a
comfort. But you can't cork that kind; they would
die. Her clack was going all day, and you would think
something would surely happen to her works, by and
by; but no, they never got out of order; and she
never had to slack up for words. She could grind,
and pump, and churn, and buzz by the week, and never
stop to oil up or blow out. And yet the result was
just nothing but wind. She never had any ideas, any
more than a fog has. She was a perfect blatherskite;
I mean for jaw, jaw, jaw, talk, talk, talk, jabber, jabber,
jabber; but just as good as she could be. I hadn't
minded her mill that morning, on account of having
that hornets' nest of other troubles; but more than
once in the afternoon I had to say:

"Take a rest, child; the way you are using up all
the domestic air, the kingdom will have to go to im-
porting it by to-morrow, and it's a low enough treasury
without that."


CHAPTER XIII.
FREEMEN

YES, it is strange how little a while at a time a per-
son can be contented. Only a little while back,
when I was riding and suffering, what a heaven this
peace, this rest, this sweet serenity in this secluded
shady nook by this purling stream would have seemed,
where I could keep perfectly comfortable all the time
by pouring a dipper of water into my armor now and
then; yet already I was getting dissatisfied; partly be-
cause I could not light my pipe -- for, although I had
long ago started a match factory, I had forgotten to
bring matches with me -- and partly because we had
nothing to eat. Here was another illustration of the
childlike improvidence of this age and people. A man
in armor always trusted to chance for his food on a
journey, and would have been scandalized at the idea
of hanging a basket of sandwiches on his spear. There
was probably not a knight of all the Round Table com-
bination who would not rather have died than been
caught carrying such a thing as that on his flagstaff.
And yet there could not be anything more sensible.
It had been my intention to smuggle a couple of sand-
wiches into my helmet, but I was interrupted in the act,
and had to make an excuse and lay them aside, and a
dog got them.

Night approached, and with it a storm. The dark-
ness came on fast. We must camp, of course. I
found a good shelter for the demoiselle under a rock,
and went off and found another for myself. But I was
obliged to remain in my armor, because I could not get
it off by myself and yet could not allow Alisande to
help, because it would have seemed so like undressing
before folk. It would not have amounted to that in
reality, because I had clothes on underneath; but the
prejudices of one's breeding are not gotten rid of just
at a jump, and I knew that when it came to stripping
off that bob-tailed iron petticoat I should be embarrassed.

With the storm came a change of weather; and the
stronger the wind blew, and the wilder the rain lashed
around, the colder and colder it got. Pretty soon,
various kinds of bugs and ants and worms and things
began to flock in out of the wet and crawl down in-
side my armor to get warm; and while some of them
behaved well enough, and snuggled up amongst my
clothes and got quiet, the majority were of a restless,
uncomfortable sort, and never stayed still, but went
on prowling and hunting for they did not know what;
especially the ants, which went tickling along in
wearisome procession from one end of me to the other
by the hour, and are a kind of creatures which I
never wish to sleep with again. It would be my advice
to persons situated in this way, to not roll or thrash
around, because this excites the interest of all the
different sorts of animals and makes every last one of
them want to turn out and see what is going on, and
this makes things worse than they were before, and of
course makes you objurgate harder, too, if you can.
Still, if one did not roll and thrash around he would
die; so perhaps it is as well to do one way as the other;
there is no real choice. Even after I was frozen solid
I could still distinguish that tickling, just as a corpse
does when he is taking electric treatment. I said I
would never wear armor after this trip.

All those trying hours whilst I was frozen and yet
was in a living fire, as you may say, on account of that
swarm of crawlers, that same unanswerable question
kept circling and circling through my tired head: How
do people stand this miserable armor? How have they
managed to stand it all these generations? How can
they sleep at night for dreading the tortures of next
day?

When the morning came at last, I was in a bad
enough plight: seedy, drowsy, fagged, from want of
sleep; weary from thrashing around, famished from
long fasting; pining for a bath, and to get rid of the
animals; and crippled with rheumatism. And how
had it fared with the nobly born, the titled aristocrat,
the Demoiselle Alisande la Carteloise? Why, she was
as fresh as a squirrel; she had slept like the dead; and
as for a bath, probably neither she nor any other noble
in the land had ever had one, and so she was not
missing it. Measured by modern standards, they were
merely modified savages, those people. This noble
lady showed no impatience to get to breakfast -- and
that smacks of the savage, too. On their journeys
those Britons were used to long fasts, and knew how to
bear them; and also how to freight up against probable
fasts before starting, after the style of the Indian and
the anaconda. As like as not, Sandy was loaded for a
three-day stretch.

We were off before sunrise, Sandy riding and I limp-
ing along behind. In half an hour we came upon a
group of ragged poor creatures who had assembled to
mend the thing which was regarded as a road. They
were as humble as animals to me; and when I pro-
posed to breakfast with them, they were so flattered, so
overwhelmed by this extraordinary condescension of
mine that at first they were not able to believe that I
was in earnest. My lady put up her scornful lip and
withdrew to one side; she said in their hearing that she
would as soon think of eating with the other cattle -- a
remark which embarrassed these poor devils merely be-
cause it referred to them, and not because it insulted or
offended them, for it didn't. And yet they were not
slaves, not chattels. By a sarcasm of law and phrase
they were freemen. Seven-tenths of the free popula-
tion of the country were of just their class and degree:
small "independent" farmers, artisans, etc.; which
is to say, they were the nation, the actual Nation;
they were about all of it that was useful, or worth sav-
ing, or really respect-worthy, and to subtract them would
have been to subtract the Nation and leave behind some
dregs, some refuse, in the shape of a king, nobility
and gentry, idle, unproductive, acquainted mainly with
the arts of wasting and destroying, and of no sort of
use or value in any rationally constructed world. And
yet, by ingenious contrivance, this gilded minority, in-
stead of being in the tail of the procession where it be-
longed, was marching head up and banners flying, at the
other end of it; had elected itself to be the Nation,
and these innumerable clams had permitted it so long
that they had come at last to accept it as a truth; and
not only that, but to believe it right and as it should
be. The priests had told their fathers and themselves
that this ironical state of things was ordained of God;
and so, not reflecting upon how unlike God it would
be to amuse himself with sarcasms, and especially such
poor transparent ones as this, they had dropped the
matter there and become respectfully quiet.

The talk of these meek people had a strange enough
sound in a formerly American ear. They were free-
men, but they could not leave the estates of their lord
or their bishop without his permission; they could not
prepare their own bread, but must have their corn
ground and their bread baked at his mill and his
bakery, and pay roundly for the same; they could not
sell a piece of their own property without paying him a
handsome percentage of the proceeds, nor buy a piece
of somebody else's without remembering him in cash
for the privilege; they had to harvest his grain for him
gratis, and be ready to come at a moment's notice,
leaving their own crop to destruction by the threatened
storm; they had to let him plant fruit trees in their
fields, and then keep their indignation to themselves
when his heedless fruit-gatherers trampled the grain
around the trees; they had to smother their anger when
his hunting parties galloped through their fields laying
waste the result of their patient toil; they were not
allowed to keep doves themselves, and when the swarms
from my lord's dovecote settled on their crops they
must not lose their temper and kill a bird, for awful
would the penalty be; when the harvest was at last
gathered, then came the procession of robbers to levy
their blackmail upon it: first the Church carted off its
fat tenth, then the king's commissioner took his twen-
tieth, then my lord's people made a mighty inroad
upon the remainder; after which, the skinned freeman
had liberty to bestow the remnant in his barn, in case
it was worth the trouble; there were taxes, and taxes,
and taxes, and more taxes, and taxes again, and yet
other taxes -- upon this free and independent pauper,
but none upon his lord the baron or the bishop, none
upon the wasteful nobility or the all-devouring Church;
if the baron would sleep unvexed, the freeman must sit
up all night after his day's work and whip the ponds to
keep the frogs quiet; if the freeman's daughter -- but
no, that last infamy of monarchical government is un-
printable; and finally, if the freeman, grown desperate
with his tortures, found his life unendurable under such
conditions, and sacrificed it and fled to death for mercy
and refuge, the gentle Church condemned him to
eternal fire, the gentle law buried him at midnight at the
cross-roads with a stake through his back, and his master
the baron or the bishop confiscated all his property and
turned his widow and his orphans out of doors.

And here were these freemen assembled in the early
morning to work on their lord the bishop's road three
days each -- gratis; every head of a family, and every
son of a family, three days each, gratis, and a day or
so added for their servants. Why, it was like reading
about France and the French, before the ever memor-
able and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand
years of such villany away in one swift tidal-wave of
blood -- one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the
proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead
of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that
people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong
and shame and misery the like of which was not to be
mated but in hell. There were two "Reigns of
Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it;
the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in
heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the
other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted
death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a
hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the
"horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Ter-
ror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift
death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from
hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is
swift death by lightning compared with death by slow
fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the
coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been
so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but
all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that
older and real Terror -- that unspeakably bitter and
awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see
in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

These poor ostensible freemen who were sharing
their breakfast and their talk with me, were as full of
humble reverence for their king and Church and nobility
as their worst enemy could desire. There was some-
thing pitifully ludicrous about it. I asked them if they
supposed a nation of people ever existed, who, with a
free vote in every man's hand, would elect that a single
family and its descendants should reign over it forever,
whether gifted or boobies, to the exclusion of all other
families -- including the voter's; and would also elect
that a certain hundred families should be raised to dizzy
summits of rank, and clothed on with offensive trans-
missible glories and privileges to the exclusion of the
rest of the nation's families -- INCLUDING HIS OWN.

They all looked unhit, and said they didn't know;
that they had never thought about it before, and it
hadn't ever occurred to them that a nation could be so
situated that every man COULD have a say in the govern-
ment. I said I had seen one -- and that it would last
until it had an Established Church. Again they were
all unhit -- at first. But presently one man looked up
and asked me to state that proposition again; and state
it slowly, so it could soak into his understanding. I
did it; and after a little he had the idea, and he
brought his fist down and said HE didn't believe a
nation where every man had a vote would voluntarily
get down in the mud and dirt in any such way; and
that to steal from a nation its will and preference must
be a crime and the first of all crimes. I said to myself:

"This one's a man. If I were backed by enough of
his sort, I would make a strike for the welfare of this
country, and try to prove myself its loyalest citizen
by making a wholesome change in its system of
government."

You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's
country, not to its institutions or its office-holders.
The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the
eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care
for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they
are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, be-
come ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect
the body from winter, disease, and death. To be
loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die
for rags -- that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure
animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by
monarchy; let monarchy keep it. I was from Con-
necticut, whose Constitution declares "that all political
power is inherent in the people, and all free govern-
ments are founded on their authority and instituted for
their benefit; and that they have AT ALL TIMES an undeni-
able and indefeasible right to ALTER THEIR FORM OF GOVERN-
MENT in such a manner as they may think expedient."

Under that gospel, the citizen who thinks he sees
that the commonwealth's political clothes are worn out,
and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new
suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor. That he may be the
only one who thinks he sees this decay, does not ex-
cuse him; it is his duty to agitate anyway, and it is the
duty of the others to vote him down if they do not see
the matter as he does.

And now here I was, in a country where a right to
say how the country should be governed was restricted
to six persons in each thousand of its population.
For the nine hundred and ninety-four to express dis-
satisfaction with the regnant system and propose to
change it, would have made the whole six shudder as
one man, it would have been so disloyal, so dishonor-
able, such putrid black treason. So to speak, I was
become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hun-
dred and ninety-four of the members furnished all the
money and did all the work, and the other six elected
themselves a permanent board of direction and took all
the dividends. It seemed to me that what the nine
hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal.
The thing that would have best suited the circus side
of my nature would have been to resign the Boss-ship
and get up an insurrection and turn it into a revolution;
but I knew that the Jack Cade or the Wat Tyler who
tries such a thing without first educating his materials
up to revolution grade is almost absolutely certain to
get left. I had never been accustomed to getting left,
even if I do say it myself. Wherefore, the "deal"
which had been for some time working into shape
in my mind was of a quite different pattern from the
Cade-Tyler sort.

So I did not talk blood and insurrection to that man
there who sat munching black bread with that abused
and mistaught herd of human sheep, but took him
aside and talked matter of another sort to him. After
I had finished, I got him to lend me a little ink from
his veins; and with this and a sliver I wrote on a piece
of bark --

  Put him in the Man-factory --

and gave it to him, and said:

"Take it to the palace at Camelot and give it into
the hands of Amyas le Poulet, whom I call Clarence,
and he will understand."

"He is a priest, then," said the man, and some of
the enthusiasm went out of his face.

"How -- a priest? Didn't I tell you that no chattel
of the Church, no bond-slave of pope or bishop can
enter my Man-Factory? Didn't I tell you that YOU
couldn't enter unless your religion, whatever it might
be, was your own free property?"

"Marry, it is so, and for that I was glad; wherefore
it liked me not, and bred in me a cold doubt, to hear
of this priest being there."

"But he isn't a priest, I tell you."

The man looked far from satisfied. He said:

"He is not a priest, and yet can read?"

"He is not a priest and yet can read -- yes, and
write, too, for that matter. I taught him myself."
The man's face cleared. "And it is the first thing
that you yourself will be taught in that Factory --"

"I? I would give blood out of my heart to know
that art. Why, I will be your slave, your --"

"No you won't, you won't be anybody's slave.
Take your family and go along. Your lord the bishop
will confiscate your small property, but no matter.
Clarence will fix you all right."


CHAPTER XIV.
"DEFEND THEE, LORD"

I PAID three pennies for my breakfast, and a most
extravagant price it was, too, seeing that one could
have breakfasted a dozen persons for that money; but
I was feeling good by this time, and I had always been
a kind of spendthrift anyway; and then these people
had wanted to give me the food for nothing, scant as
their provision was, and so it was a grateful pleasure to
emphasize my appreciation and sincere thankfulness
with a good big financial lift where the money would
do so much more good than it would in my helmet,
where, these pennies being made of iron and not stinted
in weight, my half-dollar's worth was a good deal of a
burden to me. I spent money rather too freely in
those days, it is true; but one reason for it was that I
hadn't got the proportions of things entirely adjusted,
even yet, after so long a sojourn in Britain -- hadn't
got along to where I was able to absolutely realize that
a penny in Arthur's land and a couple of dollars in
Connecticut were about one and the same thing: just
twins, as you may say, in purchasing power. If my
start from Camelot could have been delayed a very few
days I could have paid these people in beautiful new
coins from our own mint, and that would have pleased
me; and them, too, not less. I had adopted the
American values exclusively. In a week or two now,
cents, nickels, dimes, quarters, and half-dollars, and
also a trifle of gold, would be trickling in thin but
steady streams all through the commercial veins of the
kingdom, and I looked to see this new blood freshen up
its life.

The farmers were bound to throw in something, to
sort of offset my liberality, whether I would or no; so
I let them give me a flint and steel; and as soon as
they had comfortably bestowed Sandy and me on our
horse, I lit my pipe. When the first blast of smoke
shot out through the bars of my helmet, all those
people broke for the woods, and Sandy went over
backwards and struck the ground with a dull thud.
They thought I was one of those fire-belching dragons
they had heard so much about from knights and other
professional liars. I had infinite trouble to persuade
those people to venture back within explaining distance.
Then I told them that this was only a bit of enchant-
ment which would work harm to none but my enemies.
And I promised, with my hand on my heart, that if all
who felt no enmity toward me would come forward and
pass before me they should see that only those who re-
mained behind would be struck dead. The procession
moved with a good deal of promptness. There were no
casualties to report, for nobody had curiosity enough
to remain behind to see what would happen.

I lost some time, now, for these big children, their
fears gone, became so ravished with wonder over my
awe-compelling fireworks that I had to stay there and
smoke a couple of pipes out before they would let me
go. Still the delay was not wholly unproductive, for
it took all that time to get Sandy thoroughly wonted to
the new thing, she being so close to it, you know. It
plugged up her conversation mill, too, for a consider-
able while, and that was a gain. But above all other
benefits accruing, I had learned something. I was
ready for any giant or any ogre that might come along,
now.

We tarried with a holy hermit, that night, and my
opportunity came about the middle of the next after-
noon. We were crossing a vast meadow by way of
short-cut, and I was musing absently, hearing nothing,
seeing nothing, when Sandy suddenly interrupted a re-
mark which she had begun that morning, with the cry:

"Defend thee, lord! -- peril of life is toward!"

And she slipped down from the horse and ran a little
way and stood. I looked up and saw, far off in the
shade of a tree, half a dozen armed knights and their
squires; and straightway there was bustle among them
and tightening of saddle-girths for the mount. My
pipe was ready and would have been lit, if I had not
been lost in thinking about how to banish oppression
from this land and restore to all its people their stolen
rights and manhood without disobliging anybody. I lit
up at once, and by the time I had got a good head of
reserved steam on, here they came. All together, too;
none of those chivalrous magnanimities which one
reads so much about -- one courtly rascal at a time, and
the rest standing by to see fair play. No, they came
in a body, they came with a whirr and a rush, they
came like a volley from a battery; came with heads low
down, plumes streaming out behind, lances advanced at
a level. It was a handsome sight, a beautiful sight --
for a man up a tree. I laid my lance in rest and waited,
with my heart beating, till the iron wave was just ready
to break over me, then spouted a column of white
smoke through the bars of my helmet. You should
have seen the wave go to pieces and scatter! This was
a finer sight than the other one.

But these people stopped, two or three hundred
yards away, and this troubled me. My satisfaction
collapsed, and fear came; I judged I was a lost man.
But Sandy was radiant; and was going to be eloquent --
but I stopped her, and told her my magic had mis-
carried, somehow or other, and she must mount, with
all despatch, and we must ride for life. No, she
wouldn't. She said that my enchantment had disabled
those knights; they were not riding on, because they
couldn't; wait, they would drop out of their saddles
presently, and we would get their horses and harness.
I could not deceive such trusting simplicity, so I said
it was a mistake; that when my fireworks killed at all,
they killed instantly; no, the men would not die, there
was something wrong about my apparatus, I couldn't
tell what; but we must hurry and get away, for those
people would attack us again, in a minute. Sandy
laughed, and said:

"Lack-a-day, sir, they be not of that breed! Sir
Launcelot will give battle to dragons, and will abide by
them, and will assail them again, and yet again, and
still again, until he do conquer and destroy them; and
so likewise will Sir Pellinore and Sir Aglovale and Sir
Carados, and mayhap others, but there be none else
that will venture it, let the idle say what the idle will.
And, la, as to yonder base rufflers, think ye they have
not their fill, but yet desire more?"

"Well, then, what are they waiting for? Why
don't they leave? Nobody's hindering. Good land,
I'm willing to let bygones be bygones, I'm sure."

"Leave, is it? Oh, give thyself easement as to that.
They dream not of it, no, not they. They wait to
yield them."

"Come -- really, is that 'sooth' -- as you people
say? If they want to, why don't they?"

"It would like them much; but an ye wot how
dragons are esteemed, ye would not hold them blam-
able. They fear to come."

"Well, then, suppose I go to them instead, and --"

"Ah, wit ye well they would not abide your coming.
I will go."

And she did. She was a handy person to have
along on a raid. I would have considered this a doubt-
ful errand, myself. I presently saw the knights riding
away, and Sandy coming back. That was a relief. I
judged she had somehow failed to get the first innings
-- I mean in the conversation; otherwise the interview
wouldn't have been so short. But it turned out that
she had managed the business well; in fact, admirably.
She said that when she told those people I was The
Boss, it hit them where they lived: "smote them sore
with fear and dread" was her word; and then they
were ready to put up with anything she might require.
So she swore them to appear at Arthur's court within
two days and yield them, with horse and harness, and
be my knights henceforth, and subject to my command.
How much better she managed that thing than I should
have done it myself! She was a daisy.


CHAPTER XV.
SANDY'S TALE

AND so I'm proprietor of some knights," said I,
as we rode off. "Who would ever have sup-
posed that I should live to list up assets of that sort.
I shan't know what to do with them; unless I raffle
them off. How many of them are there, Sandy?"

"Seven, please you, sir, and their squires."

"It is a good haul. Who are they? Where do they
hang out?"

"Where do they hang out?"

"Yes, where do they live?"

"Ah, I understood thee not. That will I tell
eftsoons." Then she said musingly, and softly, turn-
ing the words daintily over her tongue: "Hang they
out -- hang they out -- where hang -- where do they
hang out; eh, right so; where do they hang out. Of
a truth the phrase hath a fair and winsome grace, and
is prettily worded withal. I will repeat it anon and
anon in mine idlesse, whereby I may peradventure
learn it. Where do they hang out. Even so! already
it falleth trippingly from my tongue, and forasmuch
as --"

"Don't forget the cowboys, Sandy."

"Cowboys?"

"Yes; the knights, you know: You were going to
tell me about them. A while back, you remember.
Figuratively speaking, game's called."

"Game --"

"Yes, yes, yes! Go to the bat. I mean, get to
work on your statistics, and don't burn so much
kindling getting your fire started. Tell me about the
knights."

"I will well, and lightly will begin. So they two
departed and rode into a great forest. And --"

"Great Scott!"

You see, I recognized my mistake at once. I had
set her works a-going; it was my own fault; she would
be thirty days getting down to those facts. And she
generally began without a preface and finished without
a result. If you interrupted her she would either go
right along without noticing, or answer with a couple of
words, and go back and say the sentence over again.
So, interruptions only did harm; and yet I had to in-
terrupt, and interrupt pretty frequently, too, in order
to save my life; a person would die if he let her mo-
notony drip on him right along all day.

"Great Scott! " I said in my distress. She went
right back and began over again:

"So they two departed and rode into a great forest.
And --"

"WHICH two?"

"Sir Gawaine and Sir Uwaine. And so they came
to an abbey of monks, and there were well lodged. So
on the morn they heard their masses in the abbey, and
so they rode forth till they came to a great forest; then
was Sir Gawaine ware in a valley by a turret, of
twelve fair damsels, and two knights armed on great
horses, and the damsels went to and fro by a tree.
And then was Sir Gawaine ware how there hung a
white shield on that tree, and ever as the damsels came
by it they spit upon it, and some threw mire upon the
shield --"

"Now, if I hadn't seen the like myself in this country,
Sandy, I wouldn't believe it. But I've seen it, and I
can just see those creatures now, parading before that
shield and acting like that. The women here do cer-
tainly act like all possessed. Yes, and I mean your
best, too, society's very choicest brands. The hum-
blest hello-girl along ten thousand miles of wire could
teach gentleness, patience, modesty, manners, to the
highest duchess in Arthur's land."

"Hello-girl?"

"Yes, but don't you ask me to explain; it's a new
kind of a girl; they don't have them here; one often
speaks sharply to them when they are not the least in
fault, and he can't get over feeling sorry for it and
ashamed of himself in thirteen hundred years, it's such
shabby mean conduct and so unprovoked; the fact is,
no gentleman ever does it -- though I -- well, I myself,
if I've got to confess --"

"Peradventure she --"

"Never mind her; never mind her; I tell you I
couldn't ever explain her so you would understand."

"Even so be it, sith ye are so minded. Then Sir
Gawaine and Sir Uwaine went and saluted them, and
asked them why they did that despite to the shield.
Sirs, said the damsels, we shall tell you. There is a
knight in this country that owneth this white shield, and
he is a passing good man of his hands, but he hateth
all ladies and gentlewomen, and therefore we do all this
despite to the shield. I will say you, said Sir Gawaine,
it beseemeth evil a good knight to despise all ladies and
gentlewomen, and peradventure though he hate you he
hath some cause, and peradventure he loveth in some
other places ladies and gentlewomen, and to be loved
again, and he such a man of prowess as ye speak of --"

"Man of prowess -- yes, that is the man to please
them, Sandy. Man of brains -- that is a thing they
never think of. Tom Sayers -- John Heenan -- John
L. Sullivan -- pity but you could be here. You
would have your legs under the Round Table and a
'Sir' in front of your names within the twenty-four
hours; and you could bring about a new distribution
of the married princesses and duchesses of the Court in
another twenty-four. The fact is, it is just a sort of
polished-up court of Comanches, and there isn't a
squaw in it who doesn't stand ready at the dropping of
a hat to desert to the buck with the biggest string of
scalps at his belt."

"-- and he be such a man of prowess as ye speak of,
said Sir Gawaine. Now, what is his name? Sir, said
they, his name is Marhaus the king's son of Ireland."

"Son of the king of Ireland, you mean; the other
form doesn't mean anything. And look out and hold
on tight, now, we must jump this gully....
There, we are all right now. This horse belongs in the
circus; he is born before his time."

"I know him well, said Sir Uwaine, he is a passing
good knight as any is on live."

"ON LIVE. If you've got a fault in the world,
Sandy, it is that you are a shade too archaic. But it
isn't any matter."

"-- for I saw him once proved at a justs where many
knights were gathered, and that time there might no
man withstand him. Ah, said Sir Gawaine, damsels,
methinketh ye are to blame, for it is to suppose he that
hung that shield there will not be long therefrom, and
then may those knights match him on horseback, and
that is more your worship than thus; for I will abide
no longer to see a knight's shield dishonored. And
therewith Sir Uwaine and Sir Gawaine departed a little
from them, and then were they ware where Sir Marhaus
came riding on a great horse straight toward them.
And when the twelve damsels saw Sir Marhaus they
fled into the turret as they were wild, so that some of
them fell by the way. Then the one of the knights of
the tower dressed his shield, and said on high, Sir Mar-
haus defend thee. And so they ran together that the
knight brake his spear on Marhaus, and Sir Marhaus
smote him so hard that he brake his neck and the
horse's back --"

"Well, that is just the trouble about this state of
things, it ruins so many horses."

"That saw the other knight of the turret, and
dressed him toward Marhaus, and they went so eagerly
together, that the knight of the turret was soon smitten
down, horse and man, stark dead --"

"ANOTHER horse gone; I tell you it is a custom that
ought to be broken up. I don't see how people with
any feeling can applaud and support it."

....

"So these two knights came together with great
random --"

I saw that I had been asleep and missed a chapter,
but I didn't say anything. I judged that the Irish
knight was in trouble with the visitors by this time, and
this turned out to be the case.

"-- that Sir Uwaine smote Sir Marhaus that his
spear brast in pieces on the shield, and Sir Marhaus
smote him so sore that horse and man he bare to the
earth, and hurt Sir Uwaine on the left side --

"The truth is, Alisande, these archaics are a little
TOO simple; the vocabulary is too limited, and so, by
consequence, descriptions suffer in the matter of
variety; they run too much to level Saharas of fact,
and not enough to picturesque detail; this throws about
them a certain air of the monotonous; in fact the fights
are all alike: a couple of people come together with
great random -- random is a good word, and so is
exegesis, for that matter, and so is holocaust, and de-
falcation, and usufruct and a hundred others, but land!
a body ought to discriminate -- they come together
with great random, and a spear is brast, and one party
brake his shield and the other one goes down, horse
and man, over his horse-tail and brake his neck, and
then the next candidate comes randoming in, and brast
HIS spear, and the other man brast his shield, and
down HE goes, horse and man, over his horse-tail, and
brake HIS neck, and then there's another elected, and
another and another and still another, till the material
is all used up; and when you come to figure up results,
you can't tell one fight from another, nor who whip-
ped; and as a PICTURE, of living, raging, roaring battle,
sho! why, it's pale and noiseless -- just ghosts scuffling
in a fog. Dear me, what would this barren vocabulary
get out of the mightiest spectacle? -- the burning of
Rome in Nero's time, for instance? Why, it would
merely say, 'Town burned down; no insurance; boy
brast a window, fireman brake his neck!' Why, THAT
ain't a picture!"

It was a good deal of a lecture, I thought, but it
didn't disturb Sandy, didn't turn a feather; her steam
soared steadily up again, the minute I took off the lid:

"Then Sir Marhaus turned his horse and rode toward
Gawaine with his spear. And when Sir Gawaine saw
that, he dressed his shield, and they aventred their
spears, and they came together with all the might of
their horses, that either knight smote other so hard in
the midst of their shields, but Sir Gawaine's spear
brake --"

"I knew it would."

-- "but Sir Marhaus's spear held; and therewith Sir
Gawaine and his horse rushed down to the earth --"

"Just so -- and brake his back."

-- "and lightly Sir Gawaine rose upon his feet and
pulled out his sword, and dressed him toward Sir Mar-
haus on foot, and therewith either came unto other
eagerly, and smote together with their swords, that their
shields flew in cantels, and they bruised their helms and
their hauberks, and wounded either other. But Sir
Gawaine, fro it passed nine of the clock, waxed by the
space of three hours ever stronger and stronger. and
thrice his might was increased. All this espied Sir
Marhaus, and had great wonder how his might in-
creased, and so they wounded other passing sore; and
then when it was come noon --"

The pelting sing-song of it carried me forward to
scenes and sounds of my boyhood days:

"N-e-e-ew Haven! ten minutes for refreshments --
knductr'll strike the gong-bell two minutes before train
leaves -- passengers for the Shore line please take seats
in the rear k'yar, this k'yar don't go no furder -- AHH -
pls, AW-rnjz, b'NANners, S-A-N-D'ches, p--OP-corn!"

-- "and waxed past noon and drew toward even-
song. Sir Gawaine's strength feebled and waxed pass-
ing faint, that unnethes he might dure any longer, and
Sir Marhaus was then bigger and bigger --"

"Which strained his armor, of course; and yet little
would one of these people mind a small thing like that."

-- "and so, Sir Knight, said Sir Marhaus, I have
well felt that ye are a passing good knight, and a mar-
velous man of might as ever I felt any, while it lasteth,
and our quarrels are not great, and therefore it were a
pity to do you hurt, for I feel you are passing feeble.
Ah, said Sir Gawaine, gentle knight, ye say the word
that I should say. And therewith they took off their
helms and either kissed other, and there they swore
together either to love other as brethren --"

But I lost the thread there, and dozed off to slumber,
thinking about what a pity it was that men with such
superb strength -- strength enabling them to stand up
cased in cruelly burdensome iron and drenched with
perspiration, and hack and batter and bang each other
for six hours on a stretch -- should not have been
born at a time when they could put it to some useful
purpose. Take a jackass, for instance: a jackass has
that kind of strength, and puts it to a useful purpose,
and is valuable to this world because he is a jackass;
but a nobleman is not valuable because he is a jackass.
It is a mixture that is always ineffectual, and should
never have been attempted in the first place. And yet,
once you start a mistake, the trouble is done and you
never know what is going to come of it.

When I came to myself again and began to listen, I
perceived that I had lost another chapter, and that
Alisande had wandered a long way off with her people.

"And so they rode and came into a deep valley full
of stones, and thereby they saw a fair stream of water;
above thereby was the head of the stream, a fair foun-
tain, and three damsels sitting thereby. In this coun-
try, said Sir Marhaus, came never knight since it was
christened, but he found strange adventures --"

"This is not good form, Alisande. Sir Marhaus the
king's son of Ireland talks like all the rest; you ought
to give him a brogue, or at least a characteristic exple-
tive; by this means one would recognize him as soon
as he spoke, without his ever being named. It is a
common literary device with the great authors. You
should make him say, 'In this country, be jabers, came
never knight since it was christened, but he found
strange adventures, be jabers.' You see how much
better that sounds."

-- "came never knight but he found strange adven-
tures, be jabers. Of a truth it doth indeed, fair lord,
albeit 'tis passing hard to say, though peradventure
that will not tarry but better speed with usage. And
then they rode to the damsels, and either saluted other,
and the eldest had a garland of gold about her head,
and she was threescore winter of age or more --"

"The DAMSEL was?"

"Even so, dear lord -- and her hair was white under
the garland --"

"Celluloid teeth, nine dollars a set, as like as not --
the loose-fit kind, that go up and down like a portcullis
when you eat, and fall out when you laugh."

"The second damsel was of thirty winter of age,
with a circlet of gold about her head. The third damsel
was but fifteen year of age --"

Billows of thought came rolling over my soul, and
the voice faded out of my hearing!

Fifteen! Break -- my heart! oh, my lost darling!
Just her age who was so gentle, and lovely, and all the
world to me, and whom I shall never see again! How
the thought of her carries me back over wide seas of
memory to a vague dim time, a happy time, so many,
many centuries hence, when I used to wake in the soft
summer mornings, out of sweet dreams of her, and say
"Hello, Central!" just to hear her dear voice come
melting back to me with a "Hello, Hank!" that was
music of the spheres to my enchanted ear. She got
three dollars a week, but she was worth it.

I could not follow Alisande's further explanation of
who our captured knights were, now -- I mean in case
she should ever get to explaining who they were. My
interest was gone, my thoughts were far away, and sad.
By fitful glimpses of the drifting tale, caught here and
there and now and then, I merely noted in a vague way
that each of these three knights took one of these three
damsels up behind him on his horse, and one rode
north, another east, the other south, to seek adventures,
and meet again and lie, after year and day. Year and
day -- and without baggage. It was of a piece with
the general simplicity of the country.

The sun was now setting. It was about three in the
afternoon when Alisande had begun to tell me who the
cowboys were; so she had made pretty good progress
with it -- for her. She would arrive some time or
other, no doubt, but she was not a person who could
be hurried.

We were approaching a castle which stood on high
ground; a huge, strong, venerable structure, whose
gray towers and battlements were charmingly draped
with ivy, and whose whole majestic mass was drenched
with splendors flung from the sinking sun. It was the
largest castle we had seen, and so I thought it might be
the one we were after, but Sandy said no. She did
not know who owned it; she said she had passed it
without calling, when she went down to Camelot.