APDL Eductation Resources/APDL Eductation Resources.iso/text/authors/marktwain/conneticut/CHAP16_29

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CHAPTER XVI.
MORGAN LE FAY

IF knights errant were to be believed, not all castles
were desirable places to seek hospitality in. As a
matter of fact, knights errant were NOT persons to be
believed -- that is, measured by modern standards of
veracity; yet, measured by the standards of their own
time, and scaled accordingly, you got the truth. It
was very simple: you discounted a statement ninety-
seven per cent.; the rest was fact. Now after making
this allowance, the truth remained that if I could find
out something about a castle before ringing the door-
bell -- I mean hailing the warders -- it was the sensible
thing to do. So I was pleased when I saw in the dis-
tance a horseman making the bottom turn of the road
that wound down from this castle.

As we approached each other, I saw that he wore a
plumed helmet, and seemed to be otherwise clothed in
steel, but bore a curious addition also -- a stiff square
garment like a herald's tabard. However, I had to
smile at my own forgetfulness when I got nearer and
read this sign on his tabard:

  "Persimmon's Soap -- All the Prime-Donna Use It."

That was a little idea of my own, and had several
wholesome purposes in view toward the civilizing and
uplifting of this nation. In the first place, it was a
furtive, underhand blow at this nonsense of knight
errantry, though nobody suspected that but me. I
had started a number of these people out -- the bravest
knights I could get -- each sandwiched between bul-
letin-boards bearing one device or another, and I
judged that by and by when they got to be numerous
enough they would begin to look ridiculous; and then,
even the steel-clad ass that HADN'T any board would
himself begin to look ridiculous because he was out of
the fashion.

Secondly, these missionaries would gradually, and
without creating suspicion or exciting alarm, introduce
a rudimentary cleanliness among the nobility, and from
them it would work down to the people, if the priests
could be kept quiet. This would undermine the
Church. I mean would be a step toward that. Next,
education -- next, freedom -- and then she would begin
to crumble. It being my conviction that any Estab-
lished Church is an established crime, an established
slave-pen, I had no scruples, but was willing to assail
it in any way or with any weapon that promised to
hurt it. Why, in my own former day -- in remote
centuries not yet stirring in the womb of time -- there
were old Englishmen who imagined that they had been
born in a free country: a "free" country with the
Corporation Act and the Test still in force in it --
timbers propped against men's liberties and dishonored
consciences to shore up an Established Anachronism
with.

My missionaries were taught to spell out the gilt
signs on their tabards -- the showy gilding was a neat
idea, I could have got the king to wear a bulletin-board
for the sake of that barbaric splendor -- they were to
spell out these signs and then explain to the lords and
ladies what soap was; and if the lords and ladies were
afraid of it, get them to try it on a dog. The mission-
ary's next move was to get the family together and try
it on himself; he was to stop at no experiment, how-
ever desperate. that could convince the nobility that
soap was harmless; if any final doubt remained, he
must catch a hermit -- the woods were full of them;
saints they called themselves, and saints they were be-
lieved to be. They were unspeakably holy, and worked
miracles, and everybody stood in awe of them. If a
hermit could survive a wash, and that failed to convince
a duke, give him up, let him alone.

Whenever my missionaries overcame a knight errant
on the road they washed him, and when he got well
they swore him to go and get a bulletin-board and dis-
seminate soap and civilization the rest of his days. As
a consequence the workers in the field were increasing
by degrees, and the reform was steadily spreading.
My soap factory felt the strain early. At first I had
only two hands; but before I had left home I was
already employing fifteen, and running night and day;
and the atmospheric result was getting so pronounced
that the king went sort of fainting and gasping around
and said he did not believe he could stand it much
longer, and Sir Launcelot got so that he did hardly
anything but walk up and down the roof and swear,
although I told him it was worse up there than any-
where else, but he said he wanted plenty of air; and
he was always complaining that a palace was no place
for a soap factory anyway, and said if a man was to
start one in his house he would be damned if he
wouldn't strangle him. There were ladies present,
too, but much these people ever cared for that; they
would swear before children, if the wind was their way
when the factory was going.

This missionary knight's name was La Cote Male
Taile, and he said that this castle was the abode of
Morgan le Fay, sister of King Arthur, and wife of
King Uriens. monarch of a realm about as big as the
District of Columbia -- you could stand in the middle
of it and throw bricks into the next kingdom.
"Kings" and "Kingdoms" were as thick in Britain
as they had been in little Palestine in Joshua's time,
when people had to sleep with their knees pulled up
because they couldn't stretch out without a passport.

La Cote was much depressed, for he had scored
here the worst failure of his campaign. He had not
worked off a cake; yet he had tried all the tricks of
the trade, even to the washing of a hermit; but the
hermit died. This was, indeed, a bad failure, for this
animal would now be dubbed a martyr, and would take
his place among the saints of the Roman calendar.
Thus made he his moan, this poor Sir La Cote Male
Taile, and sorrowed passing sore. And so my heart
bled for him, and I was moved to comfort and stay
him. Wherefore I said:

"Forbear to grieve, fair knight, for this is not a
defeat. We have brains, you and I; and for such as
have brains there are no defeats, but only victories.
Observe how we will turn this seeming disaster into an
advertisement; an advertisement for our soap; and
the biggest one, to draw, that was ever thought of; an
advertisement that will transform that Mount Washing-
ton defeat into a Matterhorn victory. We will put on
your bulletin-board, 'PATRONIZED BY THE ELECT.' How
does that strike you?"

"Verily, it is wonderly bethought!"

"Well, a body is bound to admit that for just a
modest little one-line ad., it's a corker."

So the poor colporteur's griefs vanished away. He
was a brave fellow, and had done mighty feats of arms
in his time. His chief celebrity rested upon the events
of an excursion like this one of mine, which he had
once made with a damsel named Maledisant, who was
as handy with her tongue as was Sandy, though in a
different way, for her tongue churned forth only rail-
ings and insult, whereas Sandy's music was of a
kindlier sort. I knew his story well, and so I knew
how to interpret the compassion that was in his face
when he bade me farewell. He supposed I was having
a bitter hard time of it.

Sandy and I discussed his story, as we rode along,
and she said that La Cote's bad luck had begun with
the very beginning of that trip; for the king's fool had
overthrown him on the first day, and in such cases it
was customary for the girl to desert to the conqueror,
but Maledisant didn't do it; and also persisted after-
ward in sticking to him, after all his defeats. But,
said I, suppose the victor should decline to accept his
spoil? She said that that wouldn't answer -- he must.
He couldn't decline; it wouldn't be regular. I made
a note of that. If Sandy's music got to be too
burdensome, some time, I would let a knight defeat
me, on the chance that she would desert to him.

In due time we were challenged by the warders,
from the castle walls, and after a parley admitted. I
have nothing pleasant to tell about that visit. But it
was not a disappointment, for I knew Mrs. le Fay by
reputation, and was not expecting anything pleasant.
She was held in awe by the whole realm, for she had
made everybody believe she was a great sorceress. All
her ways were wicked, all her instincts devilish. She
was loaded to the eyelids with cold malice. All her
history was black with crime; and among her crimes
murder was common. I was most curious to see her;
as curious as I could have been to see Satan. To my
surprise she was beautiful; black thoughts had failed
to make her expression repulsive, age had failed to
wrinkle her satin skin or mar its bloomy freshness.
She could have passed for old Uriens' granddaughter,
she could have been mistaken for sister to her own son.

As soon as we were fairly within the castle gates we
were ordered into her presence. King Uriens was
there, a kind-faced old man with a subdued look; and
also the son, Sir Uwaine le Blanchemains, in whom I
was, of course, interested on account of the tradition
that he had once done battle with thirty knights, and
also on account of his trip with Sir Gawaine and Sir
Marhaus, which Sandy had been aging me with. But
Morgan was the main attraction, the conspicuous per-
sonality here; she was head chief of this household,
that was plain. She caused us to be seated, and then
she began, with all manner of pretty graces and
graciousnesses, to ask me questions. Dear me, it was
like a bird or a flute, or something, talking. I felt
persuaded that this woman must have been misrepre-
sented, lied about. She trilled along, and trilled along,
and presently a handsome young page, clothed like the
rainbow, and as easy and undulatory of movement as a
wave, came with something on a golden salver, and,
kneeling to present it to her, overdid his graces and
lost his balance, and so fell lightly against her knee.
She slipped a dirk into him in as matter-of-course a
way as another person would have harpooned a rat!

Poor child! he slumped to the floor, twisted his silken
limbs in one great straining contortion of pain, and was
dead. Out of the old king was wrung an involuntary
"O-h!" of compassion. The look he got, made him
cut it suddenly short and not put any more hyphens in
it. Sir Uwaine, at a sign from his mother, went to
the anteroom and called some servants, and meanwhile
madame went rippling sweetly along with her talk.

I saw that she was a good housekeeper, for while
she talked she kept a corner of her eye on the servants
to see that they made no balks in handling the body
and getting it out; when they came with fresh clean
towels, she sent back for the other kind; and when
they had finished wiping the floor and were going, she
indicated a crimson fleck the size of a tear which their
duller eyes had overlooked. It was plain to me that
La Cote Male Taile had failed to see the mistress of
the house. Often, how louder and clearer than any
tongue, does dumb circumstantial evidence speak.

Morgan le Fay rippled along as musically as ever.
Marvelous woman. And what a glance she had: when
it fell in reproof upon those servants, they shrunk and
quailed as timid people do when the lightning flashes
out of a cloud. I could have got the habit myself. It
was the same with that poor old Brer Uriens; he was
always on the ragged edge of apprehension; she could
not even turn toward him but he winced.

In the midst of the talk I let drop a complimentary
word about King Arthur, forgetting for the moment
how this woman hated her brother. That one little
compliment was enough. She clouded up like
storm; she called for her guards, and said:

"Hale me these varlets to the dungeons."

That struck cold on my ears, for her dungeons had
a reputation. Nothing occurred to me to say -- or
do. But not so with Sandy. As the guard laid a
hand upon me, she piped up with the tranquilest con-
fidence, and said:

"God's wounds, dost thou covet destruction, thou
maniac? It is The Boss!"

Now what a happy idea that was! -- and so simple;
yet it would never have occurred to me. I was born
modest; not all over, but in spots; and this was one
of the spots.

The effect upon madame was electrical. It cleared
her countenance and brought back her smiles and all
her persuasive graces and blandishments; but never-
theless she was not able to entirely cover up with them
the fact that she was in a ghastly fright. She said:

"La, but do list to thine handmaid! as if one
gifted with powers like to mine might say the thing
which I have said unto one who has vanquished
Merlin, and not be jesting. By mine enchantments I
foresaw your coming, and by them I knew you when
you entered here. I did but play this little jest with
hope to surprise you into some display of your art, as
not doubting you would blast the guards with occult
fires, consuming them to ashes on the spot, a marvel
much beyond mine own ability, yet one which I have
long been childishly curious to see."

The guards were less curious, and got out as soon as
they got permission.


CHAPTER XVII.
A ROYAL BANQUET

MADAME, seeing me pacific and unresentful, no
doubt judged that I was deceived by her excuse;
for her fright dissolved away, and she was soon so
importunate to have me give an exhibition and kill
somebody, that the thing grew to be embarrassing.
However, to my relief she was presently interrupted by
the call to prayers. I will say this much for the
nobility: that, tyrannical, murderous, rapacious, and
morally rotten as they were, they were deeply and
enthusiastically religious. Nothing could divert them
from the regular and faithful performance of the pieties
enjoined by the Church. More than once I had seen
a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage,
stop to pray before cutting his throat; more than once
I had seen a noble, after ambushing and despatching
his enemy, retire to the nearest wayside shrine and
humbly give thanks, without even waiting to rob the
body. There was to be nothing finer or sweeter in the
life of even Benvenuto Cellini, that rough-hewn saint,
ten centuries later. All the nobles of Britain, with
their families, attended divine service morning and
night daily, in their private chapels, and even the
worst of them had family worship five or six times a
day besides. The credit of this belonged entirely to
the Church. Although I was no friend to that Cath-
olic Church, I was obliged to admit this. And often,
in spite of me, I found myself saying, "What would
this country be without the Church?"

After prayers we had dinner in a great banqueting
hall which was lighted by hundreds of grease-jets, and
everything was as fine and lavish and rudely splendid
as might become the royal degree of the hosts. At
the head of the hall, on a dais, was the table of the
king, queen, and their son, Prince Uwaine. Stretching
down the hall from this, was the general table, on the
floor. At this, above the salt, sat the visiting nobles
and the grown members of their families, of both
sexes, -- the resident Court, in effect -- sixty-one per-
sons; below the salt sat minor officers of the house-
hold, with their principal subordinates: altogether a
hundred and eighteen persons sitting, and about as
many liveried servants standing behind their chairs, or
serving in one capacity or another. It was a very fine
show. In a gallery a band with cymbals, horns, harps,
and other horrors, opened the proceedings with what
seemed to be the crude first-draft or original agony of
the wail known to later centuries as "In the Sweet
Bye and Bye." It was new, and ought to have been
rehearsed a little more. For some reason or other the
queen had the composer hanged, after dinner.

After this music, the priest who stood behind the
royal table said a noble long grace in ostensible Latin.
Then the battalion of waiters broke away from their
posts, and darted, rushed, flew, fetched and carried,
and the mighty feeding began; no words anywhere,
but absorbing attention to business. The rows of
chops opened and shut in vast unison, and the sound
of it was like to the muffled burr of subterranean
machinery.

The havoc continued an hour and a half, and unim-
aginable was the destruction of substantials. Of the
chief feature of the feast -- the huge wild boar that lay
stretched out so portly and imposing at the start --
nothing was left but the semblance of a hoop-skirt;
and he was but the type and symbol of what had hap-
pened to all the other dishes.

With the pastries and so on, the heavy drinking
began -- and the talk. Gallon after gallon of wine and
mead disappeared, and everybody got comfortable,
then happy, then sparklingly joyous -- both sexes, --
and by and by pretty noisy. Men told anecdotes that
were terrific to hear, but nobody blushed; and when
the nub was sprung, the assemblage let go with a
horse-laugh that shook the fortress. Ladies answered
back with historiettes that would almost have made
Queen Margaret of Navarre or even the great Elizabeth
of England hide behind a handkerchief, but nobody
hid here, but only laughed -- howled, you may say.
In pretty much all of these dreadful stories, ecclesiastics
were the hardy heroes, but that didn't worry the chap-
lain any, he had his laugh with the rest; more than
that, upon invitation he roared out a song which was
of as daring a sort as any that was sung that night.

By midnight everybody was fagged out, and sore
with laughing; and, as a rule, drunk: some weepingly,
some affectionately, some hilariously, some quarrel-
somely, some dead and under the table. Of the
ladies, the worst spectacle was a lovely young duch-
ess, whose wedding-eve this was; and indeed she was
a spectacle, sure enough. Just as she was she could
have sat in advance for the portrait of the young
daughter of the Regent d'Orleans, at the famous dinner
whence she was carried, foul-mouthed, intoxicated, and
helpless, to her bed, in the lost and lamented days of
the Ancient Regime.

Suddenly, even while the priest was lifting his hands,
and all conscious heads were bowed in reverent expec-
tation of the coming blessing, there appeared under
the arch of the far-off door at the bottom of the hall
an old and bent and white-haired lady, leaning upon a
crutch-stick; and she lifted the stick and pointed it
toward the queen and cried out:

"The wrath and curse of God fall upon you, woman
without pity, who have slain mine innocent grandchild
and made desolate this old heart that had nor chick, nor
friend nor stay nor comfort in all this world but him!"

Everybody crossed himself in a grisly fright, for a
curse was an awful thing to those people; but the
queen rose up majestic, with the death-light in her
eye, and flung back this ruthless command:

"Lay hands on her! To the stake with her!"

The guards left their posts to obey. It was a
shame; it was a cruel thing to see. What could be
done? Sandy gave me a look; I knew she had an-
other inspiration. I said:

"Do what you choose."

She was up and facing toward the queen in a mo-
ment. She indicated me, and said:

"Madame, HE saith this may not be. Recall the
commandment, or he will dissolve the castle and it
shall vanish away like the instable fabric of a dream!"

Confound it, what a crazy contract to pledge a per-
son to! What if the queen --

But my consternation subsided there, and my panic
passed off; for the queen, all in a collapse, made no
show of resistance but gave a countermanding sign and
sunk into her seat. When she reached it she was
sober. So were many of the others. The assemblage
rose, whiffed ceremony to the winds, and rushed for
the door like a mob; overturning chairs, smashing
crockery, tugging, struggling, shouldering, crowding
-- anything to get out before I should change my
mind and puff the castle into the measureless dim
vacancies of space. Well, well, well, they WERE a
superstitious lot. It is all a body can do to conceive
of it.

The poor queen was so scared and humbled that she
was even afraid to hang the composer without first
consulting me. I was very sorry for her -- indeed, any
one would have been, for she was really suffering; so
I was willing to do anything that was reasonable, and
had no desire to carry things to wanton extremities. I
therefore considered the matter thoughtfully, and ended
by having the musicians ordered into our presence to
play that Sweet Bye and Bye again, which they did.
Then I saw that she was right, and gave her permission
to hang the whole band. This little relaxation of
sternness had a good effect upon the queen. A states-
man gains little by the arbitrary exercise of iron-clad
authority upon all occasions that offer, for this wounds
the just pride of his subordinates, and thus tends to
undermine his strength. A little concession, now and
then, where it can do no harm, is the wiser policy.

Now that the queen was at ease in her mind once
more, and measurably happy, her wine naturally began
to assert itself again, and it got a little the start of her.
I mean it set her music going -- her silver bell of a
tongue. Dear me, she was a master talker. It would
not become me to suggest that it was pretty late and
that I was a tired man and very sleepy. I wished I
had gone off to bed when I had the chance. Now I
must stick it out; there was no other way. So she
tinkled along and along, in the otherwise profound and
ghostly hush of the sleeping castle, until by and by
there came, as if from deep down under us, a far-away
sound, as of a muffled shriek -- with an expression of
agony about it that made my flesh crawl. The queen
stopped, and her eyes lighted with pleasure; she tilted
her graceful head as a bird does when it listens. The
sound bored its way up through the stillness again.

"What is it?" I said.

"It is truly a stubborn soul, and endureth long. It
is many hours now."

"Endureth what?"

"The rack. Come -- ye shall see a blithe sight.
An he yield not his secret now, ye shall see him torn
asunder."

What a silky smooth hellion she was; and so com-
posed and serene, when the cords all down my legs
were hurting in sympathy with that man's pain. Con-
ducted by mailed guards bearing flaring torches, we
tramped along echoing corridors, and down stone stair-
ways dank and dripping, and smelling of mould and
ages of imprisoned night -- a chill, uncanny journey
and a long one, and not made the shorter or the
cheerier by the sorceress's talk, which was about this
sufferer and his crime. He had been accused by an
anonymous informer, of having killed a stag in the
royal preserves. I said:

"Anonymous testimony isn't just the right thing,
your Highness. It were fairer to confront the accused
with the accuser."

"I had not thought of that, it being but of small
consequence. But an I would, I could not, for that
the accuser came masked by night, and told the
forester, and straightway got him hence again, and so
the forester knoweth him not."

"Then is this Unknown the only person who saw
the stag killed?"

"Marry, NO man SAW the killing, but this Unknown
saw this hardy wretch near to the spot where the stag
lay, and came with right loyal zeal and betrayed him
to the forester."

"So the Unknown was near the dead stag, too?
Isn't it just possible that he did the killing himself?
His loyal zeal -- in a mask -- looks just a shade sus-
picious. But what is your highness's idea for racking
the prisoner? Where is the profit?"

"He will not confess, else; and then were his soul
lost. For his crime his life is forfeited by the law --
and of a surety will I see that he payeth it! -- but it
were peril to my own soul to let him die unconfessed
and unabsolved. Nay, I were a fool to fling me into
hell for HIS accommodation."

"But, your Highness, suppose he has nothing to
confess?"

"As to that, we shall see, anon. An I rack him to
death and he confess not, it will peradventure show
that he had indeed naught to confess -- ye will grant
that that is sooth? Then shall I not be damned for
an unconfessed man that had naught to confess --
wherefore, I shall be safe."

It was the stubborn unreasoning of the time. It was
useless to argue with her. Arguments have no chance
against petrified training; they wear it as little as the
waves wear a cliff. And her training was everybody's.
The brightest intellect in the land would not have been
able to see that her position was defective.

As we entered the rack-cell I caught a picture that
will not go from me; I wish it would. A native young
giant of thirty or thereabouts lay stretched upon the
frame on his back, with his wrists and ankles tied to
ropes which led over windlasses at either end. There
was no color in him; his features were contorted and
set, and sweat-drops stood upon his forehead. A
priest bent over him on each side; the executioner
stood by; guards were on duty; smoking torches
stood in sockets along the walls; in a corner crouched
a poor young creature, her face drawn with anguish,
a half-wild and hunted look in her eyes, and in her lap
lay a little child asleep. Just as we stepped across the
threshold the executioner gave his machine a slight
turn, which wrung a cry from both the prisoner and
the woman; but I shouted, and the executioner released
the strain without waiting to see who spoke. I could
not let this horror go on; it would have killed me to
see it. I asked the queen to let me clear the place
and speak to the prisoner privately; and when she was
going to object I spoke in a low voice and said I did
not want to make a scene before her servants, but I
must have my way; for I was King Arthur's repre-
sentative, and was speaking in his name. She saw she
had to yield. I asked her to indorse me to these peo-
ple, and then leave me. It was not pleasant for her,
but she took the pill; and even went further than I
was meaning to require. I only wanted the backing of
her own authority; but she said:

"Ye will do in all things as this lord shall command.
It is The Boss."

It was certainly a good word to conjure with: you
could see it by the squirming of these rats. The
queen's guards fell into line, and she and they marched
away, with their torch-bearers, and woke the echoes of
the cavernous tunnels with the measured beat of their
retreating footfalls. I had the prisoner taken from
the rack and placed upon his bed, and medicaments
applied to his hurts, and wine given him to drink.
The woman crept near and looked on, eagerly, lov-
ingly, but timorously, -- like one who fears a repulse;
indeed, she tried furtively to touch the man's forehead,
and jumped back, the picture of fright, when I turned
unconsciously toward her. It was pitiful to see.

"Lord," I said, "stroke him, lass, if you want to.
Do anything you're a mind to; don't mind me."

Why, her eyes were as grateful as an animal's, when
you do it a kindness that it understands. The baby
was out of her way and she had her cheek against the
man's in a minute. and her hands fondling his hair,
and her happy tears running down. The man revived
and caressed his wife with his eyes, which was all he
could do. I judged I might clear the den, now, and I
did; cleared it of all but the family and myself. Then
I said:

"Now, my friend, tell me your side of this matter;
I know the other side."

The man moved his head in sign of refusal. But
the woman looked pleased -- as it seemed to me --
pleased with my suggestion. I went on --

"You know of me?"

"Yes. All do, in Arthur's realms."

"If my reputation has come to you right and
straight, you should not be afraid to speak."

The woman broke in, eagerly:

"Ah, fair my lord, do thou persuade him! Thou
canst an thou wilt. Ah, he suffereth so; and it is for
me -- for ME! And how can I bear it? I would I
might see him die -- a sweet, swift death; oh, my
Hugo, I cannot bear this one!"

And she fell to sobbing and grovelling about my
feet, and still imploring. Imploring what? The man's
death? I could not quite get the bearings of the thing.
But Hugo interrupted her and said:

"Peace! Ye wit not what ye ask. Shall I starve
whom I love, to win a gentle death? I wend thou
knewest me better."

"Well," I said, "I can't quite make this out. It
is a puzzle. Now --"

"Ah, dear my lord, an ye will but persuade him!
Consider how these his tortures wound me! Oh, and
he will not speak! -- whereas, the healing, the solace
that lie in a blessed swift death --"

"What ARE you maundering about? He's going out
from here a free man and whole -- he's not going to
die."

The man's white face lit up, and the woman flung
herself at me in a most surprising explosion of joy,
and cried out:

"He is saved! -- for it is the king's word by the
mouth of the king's servant -- Arthur, the king whose
word is gold!"

"Well, then you do believe I can be trusted, after
all. Why didn't you before?"

"Who doubted? Not I, indeed; and not she."

"Well, why wouldn't you tell me your story, then?"

"Ye had made no promise; else had it been other-
wise."

"I see, I see.... And yet I believe I don't quite
see, after all. You stood the torture and refused to
confess; which shows plain enough to even the dull-
est understanding that you had nothing to confess --"

"I, my lord? How so? It was I that killed the
deer!"

"You DID? Oh, dear, this is the most mixed-up
business that ever --"

"Dear lord, I begged him on my knees to confess,
but --"

"You DID! It gets thicker and thicker. What did
you want him to do that for?"

"Sith it would bring him a quick death and save
him all this cruel pain."

"Well -- yes, there is reason in that. But HE didn't
want the quick death."

"He? Why, of a surety he DID."

"Well, then, why in the world DIDN'T he confess?"

"Ah, sweet sir, and leave my wife and chick with-
out bread and shelter?"

"Oh, heart of gold, now I see it! The bitter law
takes the convicted man's estate and beggars his widow
and his orphans. They could torture you to death,
but without conviction or confession they could not
rob your wife and baby. You stood by them like a
man; and YOU -- true wife and the woman that you
are -- you would have bought him release from torture
at cost to yourself of slow starvation and death -- well,
it humbles a body to think what your sex can do when
it comes to self-sacrifice. I'll book you both for my
colony; you'll like it there; it's a Factory where I'm
going to turn groping and grubbing automata into
MEN."


CHAPTER XVIII.
IN THE QUEEN'S DUNGEONS

WELL, I arranged all that; and I had the man sent
to his home. I had a great desire to rack the
executioner; not because he was a good, painstaking
and paingiving official, -- for surely it was not to his
discredit that he performed his functions well -- but to
pay him back for wantonly cuffing and otherwise dis-
tressing that young woman. The priests told me about
this, and were generously hot to have him punished.
Something of this disagreeable sort was turning up
every now and then. I mean, episodes that showed
that not all priests were frauds and self-seekers, but
that many, even the great majority, of these that were
down on the ground among the common people, were
sincere and right-hearted, and devoted to the alleviation
of human troubles and sufferings. Well, it was a thing
which could not be helped, so I seldom fretted about
it, and never many minutes at a time; it has never
been my way to bother much about things which you
can't cure. But I did not like it, for it was just the
sort of thing to keep people reconciled to an Estab-
lished Church. We MUST have a religion -- it goes
without saying -- but my idea is, to have it cut up into
forty free sects, so that they will police each other, as
had been the case in the United States in my time.
Concentration of power in a political machine is bad;
and and an Established Church is only a political machine;
it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, pre-
served for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and
does no good which it could not better do in a split-up
and scattered condition. That wasn't law; it wasn't
gospel: it was only an opinion -- my opinion, and I
was only a man, one man: so it wasn't worth any
more than the pope's -- or any less, for that matter.

Well, I couldn't rack the executioner, neither would
I overlook the just complaint of the priests. The man
must be punished somehow or other, so I degraded
him from his office and made him leader of the band
-- the new one that was to be started. He begged
hard, and said he couldn't play -- a plausible excuse,
but too thin; there wasn't a musician in the country
that could.

The queen was a good deal outraged, next morning
when she found she was going to have neither Hugo's
life nor his property. But I told her she must bear
this cross; that while by law and custom she certainly
was entitled to both the man's life and his property,
there were extenuating circumstances, and so in Arthur
the king's name I had pardoned him. The deer was
ravaging the man's fields, and he had killed it in sud-
den passion, and not for gain; and he had carried it
into the royal forest in the hope that that might make
detection of the misdoer impossible. Confound her, I
couldn't make her see that sudden passion is an ex-
tenuating circumstance in the killing of venison -- or
of a person -- so I gave it up and let her sulk it out
I DID think I was going to make her see it by remark-
ing that her own sudden passion in the case of the
page modified that crime.

"Crime!" she exclaimed. "How thou talkest!
Crime, forsooth! Man, I am going to PAY for him!"

Oh, it was no use to waste sense on her. Training
-- training is everything; training is all there is TO a
person. We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no
such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading
name is merely heredity and training. We have no
thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they
are transmitted to us, trained into us. All that is
original in us, and therefore fairly creditable or dis-
creditable to us, can be covered up and hidden by the
point of a cambric needle, all the rest being atoms
contributed by, and inherited from, a procession of
ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the
Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom our
race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and un-
profitably developed. And as for me, all that I think
about in this plodding sad pilgrimage, this pathetic
drift between the eternities, is to look out and humbly
live a pure and high and blameless life, and save that
one microscopic atom in me that is truly ME: the rest
may land in Sheol and welcome for all I care.

No, confound her, her intellect was good, she had
brains enough, but her training made her an ass -- that
is, from a many-centuries-later point of view. To kill
the page was no crime -- it was her right; and upon
her right she stood, serenely and unconscious of
offense. She was a result of generations of training
in the unexamined and unassailed belief that the law
which permitted her to kill a subject when she chose
was a perfectly right and righteous one.

Well, we must give even Satan his due. She de-
served a compliment for one thing; and I tried to pay
it, but the words stuck in my throat. She had a right
to kill the boy, but she was in no wise obliged to pay
for him. That was law for some other people, but
not for her. She knew quite well that she was doing a
large and generous thing to pay for that lad, and that
I ought in common fairness to come out with some-
thing handsome about it, but I couldn't -- my mouth
refused. I couldn't help seeing, in my fancy, that
poor old grandma with the broken heart, and that fair
young creature lying butchered, his little silken pomps
and vanities laced with his golden blood. How could
she PAY for him! WHOM could she pay? And so,
well knowing that this woman, trained as she had been,
deserved praise, even adulation, I was yet not able to
utter it, trained as I had been. The best I could do
was to fish up a compliment from outside, so to speak
-- and the pity of it was, that it was true:

"Madame, your people will adore you for this."

Quite true, but I meant to hang her for it some day
if I lived. Some of those laws were too bad, altogether
too bad. A master might kill his slave for nothing --
for mere spite, malice, or to pass the time -- just as
we have seen that the crowned head could do it with
HIS slave, that is to say, anybody. A gentleman could
kill a free commoner, and pay for him -- cash or
garden-truck. A noble could kill a noble without ex-
pense, as far as the law was concerned, but reprisals in
kind were to be expected. ANYbody could kill SOME-
body, except the commoner and the slave; these had
no privileges. If they killed, it was murder, and the
law wouldn't stand murder. It made short work of
the experimenter -- and of his family, too, if he mur-
dered somebody who belonged up among the orna-
mental ranks. If a commoner gave a noble even so
much as a Damiens-scratch which didn't kill or even
hurt, he got Damiens' dose for it just the same; they
pulled him to rags and tatters with horses, and all the
world came to see the show, and crack jokes, and have
a good time; and some of the performances of the
best people present were as tough, and as properly
unprintable, as any that have been printed by the
pleasant Casanova in his chapter about the dismember-
ment of Louis XV.'s poor awkward enemy.

I had had enough of this grisly place by this time,
and wanted to leave, but I couldn't, because I had
something on my mind that my conscience kept prod-
ding me about, and wouldn't let me forget. If I had
the remaking of man, he wouldn't have any conscience.
It is one of the most disagreeable things connected
with a person; and although it certainly does a great
deal of good, it cannot be said to pay, in the long run;
it would be much better to have less good and more
comfort. Still, this is only my opinion, and I am only
one man; others, with less experience, may think
differently. They have a right to their view. I only
stand to this: I have noticed my conscience for many
years, and I know it is more trouble and bother to me
than anything else I started with. I suppose that in
the beginning I prized it, because we prize anything
that is ours; and yet how foolish it was to think so.
If we look at it in another way, we see how absurd it
is: if I had an anvil in me would I prize it? Of course
not. And yet when you come to think, there is no
real difference between a conscience and an anvil -- I
mean for comfort. I have noticed it a thousand times.
And you could dissolve an anvil with acids, when you
couldn't stand it any longer; but there isn't any way
that you can work off a conscience -- at least so it will
stay worked off; not that I know of, anyway.

There was something I wanted to do before leaving,
but it was a disagreeable matter, and I hated to go at
it. Well, it bothered me all the morning. I could
have mentioned it to the old king, but what would be
the use? -- he was but an extinct volcano; he had
been active in his time, but his fire was out, this good
while, he was only a stately ash-pile now; gentle
enough, and kindly enough for my purpose, without
doubt, but not usable. He was nothing, this so-called
king: the queen was the only power there. And she
was a Vesuvius. As a favor, she might consent to
warm a flock of sparrows for you, but then she might
take that very opportunity to turn herself loose and
bury a city. However, I reflected that as often as any
other way, when you are expecting the worst, you get
something that is not so bad, after all.

So I braced up and placed my matter before her
royal Highness. I said I had been having a general
jail-delivery at Camelot and among neighboring castles,
and with her permission I would like to examine her
collection, her bric-a-brac -- that is to say, her prison-
ers. She resisted; but I was expecting that. But she
finally consented. I was expecting that, too, but not
so soon. That about ended my discomfort. She
called her guards and torches, and we went down into
the dungeons. These were down under the castle's
foundations, and mainly were small cells hollowed out
of the living rock. Some of these cells had no light at
all. In one of them was a woman, in foul rags, who
sat on the ground, and would not answer a question or
speak a word, but only looked up at us once or twice,
through a cobweb of tangled hair, as if to see what
casual thing it might be that was disturbing with sound
and light the meaningless dull dream that was become
her life; after that, she sat bowed, with her dirt-caked
fingers idly interlocked in her lap, and gave no further
sign. This poor rack of bones was a woman of middle
age, apparently; but only apparently; she had been
there nine years, and was eighteen when she entered.
She was a commoner, and had been sent here on her
bridal night by Sir Breuse Sance Pite, a neighboring
lord whose vassal her father was, and to which said
lord she had refused what has since been called le droit
du seigneur, and, moreover, had opposed violence to
violence and spilt half a gill of his almost sacred blood.
The young husband had interfered at that point. be-
lieving the bride's life in danger, and had flung the
noble out into the midst of the humble and trembling
wedding guests, in the parlor, and left him there aston-
ished at this strange treatment, and implacably embit-
tered against both bride and groom. The said lord
being cramped for dungeon-room had asked the queen
to accommodate his two criminals, and here in her
bastile they had been ever since; hither, indeed, they
had come before their crime was an hour old, and had
never seen each other since. Here they were, ken-
neled like toads in the same rock; they had passed
nine pitch dark years within fifty feet of each other,
yet neither knew whether the other was alive or not.
All the first years, their only question had been --
asked with beseechings and tears that might have
moved stones, in time, perhaps, but hearts are not
stones: "Is he alive?" "Is she alive?" But they
had never got an answer; and at last that question was
not asked any more -- or any other.

I wanted to see the man, after hearing all this. He
was thirty-four years old, and looked sixty. He sat
upon a squared block of stone, with his head bent
down, his forearms resting on his knees, his long hair
hanging like a fringe before his face, and he was
muttering to himself. He raised his chin and looked
us slowly over, in a listless dull way, blinking with the
distress of the torchlight, then dropped his head and
fell to muttering again and took no further notice of
us. There were some pathetically suggestive dumb
witnesses present. On his wrists and ankles were
cicatrices, old smooth scars, and fastened to the stone
on which he sat was a chain with manacles and fetters
attached; but this apparatus lay idle on the ground,
and was thick with rust. Chains cease to be needed
after the spirit has gone out of a prisoner.

I could not rouse the man; so I said we would take
him to her, and see -- to the bride who was the fairest
thing in the earth to him, once -- roses, pearls, and dew
made flesh, for him; a wonder-work, the master-work
of nature: with eyes like no other eyes, and voice like
no other voice, and a freshness, and lithe young grace,
and beauty, that belonged properly to the creatures of
dreams -- as he thought -- and to no other. The sight
of her would set his stagnant blood leaping; the sight
of her --

But it was a disappointment. They sat together on
the ground and looked dimly wondering into each
other's faces a while, with a sort of weak animal curi-
osity; then forgot each other's presence, and dropped
their eyes, and you saw that they were away again and
wandering in some far land of dreams and shadows
that we know nothing about.

I had them taken out and sent to their friends. The
queen did not like it much. Not that she felt any
personal interest in the matter, but she thought it dis-
respectful to Sir Breuse Sance Pite. However, I
assured her that if he found he couldn't stand it I
would fix him so that he could.

I set forty-seven prisoners loose out of those awful
rat-holes, and left only one in captivity. He was a
lord, and had killed another lord, a sort of kinsman of
the queen. That other lord had ambushed him to
assassinate him, but this fellow had got the best of him
and cut his throat. However, it was not for that that
I left him jailed, but for maliciously destroying the
only public well in one of his wretched villages. The
queen was bound to hang him for killing her kinsman,
but I would not allow it: it was no crime to kill an
assassin. But I said I was willing to let her hang him
for destroying the well; so she concluded to put up
with that, as it was better than nothing.

Dear me, for what trifling offenses the most of those
forty-seven men and women were shut up there! In-
deed, some were there for no distinct offense at all,
but only to gratify somebody's spite; and not always
the queen's by any means, but a friend's. The newest
prisoner's crime was a mere remark which he had
made. He said he believed that men were about all
alike, and one man as good as another, barring clothes.
He said he believed that if you were to strip the nation
naked and send a stranger through the crowd, he
couldn't tell the king from a quack doctor, nor a duke
from a hotel clerk. Apparently here was a man whose
brains had not been reduced to an ineffectual mush by
idiotic training. I set him loose and sent him to the
Factory.

Some of the cells carved in the living rock were just
behind the face of the precipice, and in each of these
an arrow-slit had been pierced outward to the daylight,
and so the captive had a thin ray from the blessed sun
for his comfort. The case of one of these poor fel-
lows was particularly hard. From his dusky swallow's
hole high up in that vast wall of native rock he could
peer out through the arrow-slit and see his own home
off yonder in the valley; and for twenty-two years he
had watched it, with heartache and longing, through
that crack. He could see the lights shine there at
night, and in the daytime he could see figures go in
and come out -- his wife and children, some of them,
no doubt, though he could not make out at that dis-
tance. In the course of years he noted festivities
there, and tried to rejoice, and wondered if they were
weddings or what they might be. And he noted
funerals; and they wrung his heart. He could make
out the coffin, but he could not determine its size, and
so could not tell whether it was wife or child. He
could see the procession form, with priests and mourn-
ers, and move solemnly away, bearing the secret with
them. He had left behind him five children and a
wife; and in nineteen years he had seen five funerals
issue, and none of them humble enough in pomp to
denote a servant. So he had lost five of his treasures;
there must still be one remaining -- one now infinitely,
unspeakably precious, -- but WHICH one? wife, or child?
That was the question that tortured him, by night and
by day, asleep and awake. Well, to have an interest,
of some sort, and half a ray of light, when you are in
a dungeon, is a great support to the body and preserver
of the intellect. This man was in pretty good condi-
tion yet. By the time he had finished telling me his
distressful tale, I was in the same state of mind that
you would have been in yourself, if you have got
average human curiosity; that is to say, I was as
burning up as he was to find out which member of
the family it was that was left. So I took him over
home myself; and an amazing kind of a surprise party
it was, too -- typhoons and cyclones of frantic joy,
and whole Niagaras of happy tears; and by George!
we found the aforetime young matron graying toward
the imminent verge of her half century, and the babies
all men and women, and some of them married and
experimenting familywise themselves -- for not a soul
of the tribe was dead! Conceive of the ingenious
devilishness of that queen: she had a special hatred
for this prisoner, and she had INVENTED all those funer-
als herself, to scorch his heart with; and the sublimest
stroke of genius of the whole thing was leaving the
family-invoice a funeral SHORT, so as to let him wear his
poor old soul out guessing.

But for me, he never would have got out. Morgan
le Fay hated him with her whole heart, and she never
would have softened toward him. And yet his crime
was committed more in thoughtlessness than deliberate
depravity. He had said she had red hair. Well, she
had; but that was no way to speak of it. When red-
headed people are above a certain social grade their
hair is auburn.

Consider it: among these forty-seven captives there
were five whose names, offenses, and dates of incar-
ceration were no longer known! One woman and four
men -- all bent, and wrinkled, and mind-extinguished
patriarchs. They themselves had long ago forgotten
these details; at any rate they had mere vague theories
about them, nothing definite and nothing that they re-
peated twice in the same way. The succession of
priests whose office it had been to pray daily with the
captives and remind them that God had put them
there, for some wise purpose or other, and teach them
that patience, humbleness, and submission to oppres-
sion was what He loved to see in parties of a subordi-
nate rank, had traditions about these poor old human
ruins, but nothing more. These traditions went but
little way, for they concerned the length of the incar-
ceration only, and not the names of the offenses. And
even by the help of tradition the only thing that could
be proven was that none of the five had seen daylight
for thirty-five years: how much longer this privation
has lasted was not guessable. The king and the queen
knew nothing about these poor creatures, except that
they were heirlooms, assets inherited, along with the
throne, from the former firm. Nothing of their history
had been transmitted with their persons, and so the
inheriting owners had considered them of no value,
and had felt no interest in them. I said to the queen:

"Then why in the world didn't you set them free?"

The question was a puzzler. She didn't know WHY
she hadn't, the thing had never come up in her mind.
So here she was, forecasting the veritable history of
future prisoners of the Castle d'If, without knowing it.
It seemed plain to me now, that with her training,
those inherited prisoners were merely property -- noth-
ing more, nothing less. Well, when we inherit prop-
erty, it does not occur to us to throw it away, even
when we do not value it.

When I brought my procession of human bats up
into the open world and the glare of the afternoon sun
-- previously blindfolding them, in charity for eyes
so long untortured by light --  they were a spectacle
to look at. Skeletons, scarecrows, goblins, pathetic
frights, every one; legitimatest possible children of
Monarchy by the Grace of God and the Established
Church. I muttered absently:

"I WISH I could photograph them!"

You have seen that kind of people who will never let
on that they don't know the meaning of a new big
word. The more ignorant they are, the more pitifully
certain they are to pretend you haven't shot over their
heads. The queen was just one of that sort, and was
always making the stupidest blunders by reason of it.
She hesitated a moment; then her face brightened up
with sudden comprehension, and she said she would
do it for me.

I thought to myself: She? why what can she know
about photography? But it was a poor time to be
thinking. When I looked around, she was moving on
the procession with an axe!

Well, she certainly was a curious one, was Morgan
le Fay. I have seen a good many kinds of women in
my time, but she laid over them all for variety. And
how sharply characteristic of her this episode was.
She had no more idea than a horse of how to photo-
graph a procession; but being in doubt, it was just
like her to try to do it with an axe.


CHAPTER XIX.
KNIGHT-ERRANTRY AS A TRADE

SANDY and I were on the road again, next morn-
ing, bright and early. It was so good to open up
one's lungs and take in whole luscious barrels-ful of
the blessed God's untainted, dew-fashioned, woodland-
scented air once more, after suffocating body and mind
for two days and nights in the moral and physical
stenches of that intolerable old buzzard-roost!
mean, for me: of course the place was all right and
agreeable enough for Sandy, for she had been used to
high life all her days.

Poor girl, her jaws had had a wearisome rest now
for a while, and I was expecting to get the conse-
quences. I was right; but she had stood by me most
helpfully in the castle, and had mightily supported and
reinforced me with gigantic foolishnesses which were
worth more for the occasion than wisdoms double
their size; so I thought she had earned a right to work
her mill for a while, if she wanted to, and I felt not a
pang when she started it up:

"Now turn we unto Sir Marhaus that rode with the
damsel of thirty winter of age southward --"

"Are you going to see if you can work up another
half-stretch on the trail of the cowboys, Sandy?"

"Even so, fair my lord."

"Go ahead, then. I won't interrupt this time, if I
can help it. Begin over again; start fair, and shake
out all your reefs, and I will load my pipe and give
good attention."

"Now turn we unto Sir Marhaus that rode with the
damsel of thirty winter of age southward. And so
they came into a deep forest, and by fortune they were
nighted, and rode along in a deep way, and at the last
they came into a courtelage where abode the duke of
South Marches, and there they asked harbour. And
on the morn the duke sent unto Sir Marhaus, and bad
him make him ready. And so Sir Marhaus arose and
armed him, and there was a mass sung afore him, and
he brake his fast, and so mounted on horseback in the
court of the castle, there they should do the battle.
So there was the duke already on horseback, clean
armed, and his six sons by him, and every each had a
spear in his hand, and so they encountered, whereas
the duke and his two sons brake their spears upon
him, but Sir Marhaus held up his spear and touched
none of them. Then came the four sons by couples,
and two of them brake their spears, and so did the
other two. And all this while Sir Marhaus touched
them not. Then Sir Marhaus ran to the duke, and
smote him with his spear that horse and man fell to
the earth. And so he served his sons. And then Sir
Marhaus alight down, and bad the duke yield him or
else he would slay him. And then some of his sons
recovered, and would have set upon Sir Marhaus.
Then Sir Marhaus said to the duke, Cease thy sons, or
else I will do the uttermost to you all. When the
duke saw he might not escape the death, he cried to
his sons, and charged them to yield them to Sir Mar-
haus. And they kneeled all down and put the pom-
mels of their swords to the knight, and so he received
them. And then they holp up their father, and so by
their common assent promised unto Sir Marhaus never
to be foes unto King Arthur, and thereupon at Whit-
suntide after, to come he and his sons, and put them
in the king's grace. *

[* Footnote: The story is borrowed, language and
all, from the Morte d'Arthur. --M.T.]

"Even so standeth the history, fair Sir Boss. Now
ye shall wit that that very duke and his six sons are
they whom but few days past you also did overcome
and send to Arthur's court!"

"Why, Sandy, you can't mean it!"

"An I speak not sooth, let it be the worse for me."

"Well, well, well, -- now who would ever have
thought it? One whole duke and six dukelets; why,
Sandy, it was an elegant haul. Knight-errantry is a
most chuckle-headed trade, and it is tedious hard
work, too, but I begin to see that there IS money in
it, after all, if you have luck. Not that I would ever
engage in it as a business, for I wouldn't. No sound
and legitimate business can be established on a basis of
speculation. A successful whirl in the knight-errantry
line -- now what is it when you blow away the non-
sense and come down to the cold facts? It's just a
corner in pork, that's all, and you can't make anything
else out of it. You're rich -- yes, -- suddenly rich --
for about a day, maybe a week; then somebody cor-
ners the market on YOU, and down goes your bucket-
shop; ain't that so, Sandy?"

"Whethersoever it be that my mind miscarrieth,
bewraying simple language in such sort that the words
do seem to come endlong and overthwart --"

"There's no use in beating about the bush and
trying to get around it that way, Sandy, it's SO, just as
I say. I KNOW it's so. And, moreover, when you
come right down to the bedrock, knight-errantry is
WORSE than pork; for whatever happens, the pork's
left, and so somebody's benefited anyway; but when
the market breaks, in a knight-errantry whirl, and
every knight in the pool passes in his checks, what
have you got for assets? Just a rubbish-pile of bat-
tered corpses and a barrel or two of busted hardware.
Can you call THOSE assets? Give me pork, every time.
Am I right?"

"Ah, peradventure my head being distraught by
the manifold matters whereunto the confusions of these
but late adventured haps and fortunings whereby not
I alone nor you alone, but every each of us, meseem-
eth --"

"No, it's not your head, Sandy. Your head's all
right, as far as it goes, but you don't know business;
that's where the trouble is. It unfits you to argue
about business, and you're wrong to be always trying.
However, that aside, it was a good haul, anyway, and
will breed a handsome crop of reputation in Arthur's
court. And speaking of the cowboys, what a curious
country this is for women and men that never get old.
Now there's Morgan le Fay, as fresh and young as a
Vassar pullet, to all appearances, and here is this old
duke of the South Marches still slashing away with
sword and lance at his time of life, after raising such a
family as he has raised. As I understand it, Sir
Gawaine killed seven of his sons, and still he had six
left for Sir Marhaus and me to take into camp. And
then there was that damsel of sixty winter of age still
excursioning around in her frosty bloom -- How old
are you, Sandy?"

It was the first time I ever struck a still place in her.
The mill had shut down for repairs, or something.


CHAPTER XX.
THE OGRE'S CASTLE

BETWEEN six and nine we made ten miles, which
was plenty for a horse carrying triple -- man,
woman, and armor; then we stopped for a long noon-
ing under some trees by a limpid brook.

Right so came by and by a knight riding; and as he
drew near he made dolorous moan, and by the words
of it I perceived that he was cursing and swearing; yet
nevertheless was I glad of his coming, for that I saw
he bore a bulletin-board whereon in letters all of
shining gold was writ:

  "USE PETERSON S PROPHYLACTIC TOOTH-BRUSH--
  ALL THE GO."

I was glad of his coming, for even by this token I
knew him for knight of mine. It was Sir Madok de
la Montaine, a burly great fellow whose chief distinc-
tion was that he had come within an ace of sending Sir
Launcelot down over his horse-tail once. He was
never long in a stranger's presence without finding
some pretext or other to let out that great fact. But
there was another fact of nearly the same size, which
he never pushed upon anybody unasked, and yet never
withheld when asked: that was, that the reason he
didn't quite succeed was, that he was interrupted and
sent down over horse-tail himself. This innocent vast
lubber did not see any particular difference between
the two facts. I liked him, for he was earnest in his
work, and very valuable. And he was so fine to look
at, with his broad mailed shoulders, and the grand
leonine set of his plumed head, and his big shield
with its quaint device of a gauntleted hand clutch-
ing a prophylactic tooth-brush, with motto: "Try
Noyoudont." This was a tooth-wash that I was
introducing.

He was aweary, he said, and indeed he looked it;
but he would not alight. He said he was after the
stove-polish man; and with this he broke out cursing
and swearing anew. The bulletin-boarder referred to
was Sir Ossaise of Surluse, a brave knight, and of
considerable celebrity on account of his having tried
conclusions in a tournament once, with no less a Mogul
that Sir Gaheris himself -- although not successfully.
He was of a light and laughing disposition, and to him
nothing in this world was serious. It was for this
reason that I had chosen him to work up a stove-polish
sentiment. There were no stoves yet, and so there
could be nothing serious about stove-polish. All that
the agent needed to do was to deftly and by degrees
prepare the public for the great change, and have them
established in predilections toward neatness against the
time when the stove should appear upon the stage.

Sir Madok was very bitter, and brake out anew with
cursings. He said he had cursed his soul to rags;
and yet he would not get down from his horse, neither
would he take any rest, or listen to any comfort, until
he should have found Sir Ossaise and settled this ac-
count. It appeared, by what I could piece together
of the unprofane fragments of his statement, that he
had chanced upon Sir Ossaise at dawn of the morning,
and been told that if he would make a short cut across
the fields and swamps and broken hills and glades, he
could head off a company of travelers who would be
rare customers for prophylactics and tooth-wash. With
characteristic zeal Sir Madok had plunged away at
once upon this quest, and after three hours of awful
crosslot riding had overhauled his game. And behold,
it was the five patriarchs that had been released from
the dungeons the evening before! Poor old creatures,
it was all of twenty years since any one of them had
known what it was to be equipped with any remaining
snag or remnant of a tooth.

"Blank-blank-blank him," said Sir Madok, "an I
do not stove-polish him an I may find him, leave it to
me; for never no knight that hight Ossaise or aught
else may do me this disservice and bide on live, an I
may find him, the which I have thereunto sworn a
great oath this day."

And with these words and others, he lightly took his
spear and gat him thence. In the middle of the after-
noon we came upon one of those very patriarchs our-
selves, in the edge of a poor village. He was basking
in the love of relatives and friends whom he had not
seen for fifty years; and about him and caressing him
were also descendants of his own body whom he had
never seen at all till now; but to him these were all
strangers, his memory was gone, his mind was stag-
nant. It seemed incredible that a man could outlast
half a century shut up in a dark hole like a rat, but
here were his old wife and some old comrades to
testify to it. They could remember him as he was in
the freshness and strength of his young manhood,
when he kissed his child and delivered it to its mother's
hands and went away into that long oblivion. The
people at the castle could not tell within half a genera-
tion the length of time the man had been shut up there
for his unrecorded and forgotten offense; but this old
wife knew; and so did her old child, who stood there
among her married sons and daughters trying to realize
a father who had been to her a name, a thought, a
formless image, a tradition, all her life, and now was
suddenly concreted into actual flesh and blood and set
before her face.

It was a curious situation; yet it is not on that ac-
count that I have made room for it here, but on
account of a thing which seemed to me still more
curious. To wit, that this dreadful matter brought
from these downtrodden people no outburst of rage
against these oppressors. They had been heritors and
subjects of cruelty and outrage so long that nothing
could have startled them but a kindness. Yes, here
was a curious revelation, indeed, of the depth to which
this people had been sunk in slavery. Their entire
being was reduced to a monotonous dead level of
patience, resignation, dumb uncomplaining acceptance
of whatever might befall them in this life. Their very
imagination was dead. When you can say that of a
man, he has struck bottom, I reckon; there is no
lower deep for him.

I rather wished I had gone some other road. This
was not the sort of experience for a statesman to en-
counter who was planning out a peaceful revolution in
his mind. For it could not help bringing up the un-
get-aroundable fact that, all gentle cant and philoso-
phizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in
the world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-
goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law
that all revolutions that will succeed must BEGIN in
blood, whatever may answer afterward. If history
teaches anything, it teaches that. What this folk
needed, then, was a Reign of Terror and a guillotine,
and I was the wrong man for them.

Two days later, toward noon, Sandy began to show
signs of excitement and feverish expectancy. She
said we were approaching the ogre's castle. I was
surprised into an uncomfortable shock. The object of
our quest had gradually dropped out of my mind; this
sudden resurrection of it made it seem quite a real and
startling thing for a moment, and roused up in me a
smart interest. Sandy's excitement increased every
moment; and so did mine, for that sort of thing is
catching. My heart got to thumping. You can't
reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and
thumps about things which the intellect scorns. Pres-
ently, when Sandy slid from the horse, motioned me
to stop, and went creeping stealthily, with her head
bent nearly to her knees, toward a row of bushes that
bordered a declivity, the thumpings grew stronger and
quicker. And they kept it up while she was gaining
her ambush and getting her glimpse over the declivity;
and also while I was creeping to her side on my knees.
Her eyes were burning now, as she pointed with her
finger, and said in a panting whisper:

"The castle! The castle! Lo, where it looms!"

What a welcome disappointment I experienced! I
said:

"Castle? It is nothing but a pigsty; a pigsty with
a wattled fence around it."

She looked surprised and distressed. The animation
faded out of her face; and during many moments she
was lost in thought and silent. Then:

"It was not enchanted aforetime," she said in a
musing fashion, as if to herself. "And how strange
is this marvel, and how awful -- that to the one per-
ception it is enchanted and dight in a base and shame-
ful aspect; yet to the perception of the other it is not
enchanted, hath suffered no change, but stands firm
and stately still, girt with its moat and waving its ban-
ners in the blue air from its towers. And God shield
us, how it pricks the heart to see again these gracious
captives, and the sorrow deepened in their sweet faces!
We have tarried along, and are to blame."

I saw my cue. The castle was enchanted to ME, not
to her. It would be wasted time to try to argue her
out of her delusion, it couldn't be done; I must just
humor it. So I said:

"This is a common case -- the enchanting of a thing
to one eye and leaving it in its proper form to another.
You have heard of it before, Sandy, though you
haven't happened to experience it. But no harm is
done. In fact, it is lucky the way it is. If these
ladies were hogs to everybody and to themselves, it
would be necessary to break the enchantment, and that
might be impossible if one failed to find out the par-
ticular process of the enchantment. And hazardous,
too; for in attempting a disenchantment without the
true key, you are liable to err, and turn your hogs into
dogs, and the dogs into cats, the cats into rats, and so
on, and end by reducing your materials to nothing
finally, or to an odorless gas which you can't follow --
which, of course, amounts to the same thing. But
here, by good luck, no one's eyes but mine are under
the enchantment, and so it is of no consequence to
dissolve it. These ladies remain ladies to you, and to
themselves, and to everybody else; and at the same
time they will suffer in no way from my delusion, for
when I know that an ostensible hog is a lady, that is
enough for me, I know how to treat her."

"Thanks, oh, sweet my lord, thou talkest like an
angel. And I know that thou wilt deliver them, for
that thou art minded to great deeds and art as strong a
knight of your hands and as brave to will and to do,
as any that is on live."

"I will not leave a princess in the sty, Sandy. Are
those three yonder that to my disordered eyes are
starveling swine-herds --"

"The ogres, Are THEY changed also? It is most
wonderful. Now am I fearful; for how canst thou
strike with sure aim when five of their nine cubits of
stature are to thee invisible? Ah, go warily, fair sir;
this is a mightier emprise than I wend."

"You be easy, Sandy. All I need to know is, how
MUCH of an ogre is invisible; then I know how to
locate his vitals. Don't you be afraid, I will make
short work of these bunco-steerers. Stay where you
are."

I left Sandy kneeling there, corpse-faced but plucky
and hopeful, and rode down to the pigsty, and struck
up a trade with the swine-herds. I won their gratitude
by buying out all the hogs at the lump sum of sixteen
pennies, which was rather above latest quotations. I
was just in time; for the Church, the lord of the
manor, and the rest of the tax-gatherers would have
been along next day and swept off pretty much all the
stock, leaving the swine-herds very short of hogs and
Sandy out of princesses. But now the tax people
could be paid in cash, and there would be a stake left
besides. One of the men had ten children; and he
said that last year when a priest came and of his ten
pigs took the fattest one for tithes, the wife burst out
upon him, and offered him a child and said:

"Thou beast without bowels of mercy, why leave
me my child, yet rob me of the wherewithal to feed it?"

How curious. The same thing had happened in the
Wales of my day, under this same old Established
Church, which was supposed by many to have changed
its nature when it changed its disguise.

I sent the three men away, and then opened the sty
gate and beckoned Sandy to come -- which she did;
and not leisurely, but with the rush of a prairie fire.
And when I saw her fling herself upon those hogs,
with tears of joy running down her cheeks, and strain
them to her heart, and kiss them, and caress them,
and call them reverently by grand princely names, I
was ashamed of her, ashamed of the human race.

We had to drive those hogs home -- ten miles; and
no ladies were ever more fickle-minded or contrary.
They would stay in no road, no path; they broke out
through the brush on all sides, and flowed away in all
directions, over rocks, and hills, and the roughest
places they could find. And they must not be struck,
or roughly accosted; Sandy could not bear to see
them treated in ways unbecoming their rank. The
troublesomest old sow of the lot had to be called my
Lady, and your Highness, like the rest. It is annoy-
ing and difficult to scour around after hogs, in armor.
There was one small countess, with an iron ring in her
snout and hardly any hair on her back, that was the
devil for perversity. She gave me a race of an hour,
over all sorts of country, and then we were right where
we had started from, having made not a rod of real
progress. I seized her at last by the tail, and brought
her along squealing. When I overtook Sandy she was
horrified, and said it was in the last degree indelicate
to drag a countess by her train.

We got the hogs home just at dark -- most of them.
The princess Nerovens de Morganore was missing, and
two of her ladies in waiting: namely, Miss Angela
Bohun, and the Demoiselle Elaine Courtemains, the
former of these two being a young black sow with a
white star in her forehead, and the latter a brown one
with thin legs and a slight limp in the forward shank
on the starboard side -- a couple of the tryingest blis-
ters to drive that I ever saw. Also among the missing
were several mere baronesses -- and I wanted them to
stay missing; but no, all that sausage-meat had to be
found; so servants were sent out with torches to scour
the woods and hills to that end.

Of course, the whole drove was housed in the house,
and, great guns! -- well, I never saw anything like it.
Nor ever heard anything like it. And never smelt
anything like it. It was like an insurrection in a gaso-
meter.


CHAPTER XXI.
THE PILGRIMS

WHEN I did get to bed at last I was unspeakably
tired; the stretching out, and the relaxing of
the long-tense muscles, how luxurious, how delicious!
but that was as far as I could get -- sleep was out of
the question for the present. The ripping and tearing
and squealing of the nobility up and down the halls
and corridors was pandemonium come again, and kept
me broad awake. Being awake, my thoughts were
busy, of course; and mainly they busied themselves
with Sandy's curious delusion. Here she was, as sane
a person as the kingdom could produce; and yet,
from my point of view she was acting like a crazy
woman. My land, the power of training! of influence!
of education! It can bring a body up to believe any-
thing. I had to put myself in Sandy's place to realize
that she was not a lunatic. Yes, and put her in mine,
to demonstrate how easy it is to seem a lunatic to a
person who has not been taught as you have been
taught. If I had told Sandy I had seen a wagon,
uninfluenced by enchantment, spin along fifty miles an
hour; had seen a man, unequipped with magic powers,
get into a basket and soar out of sight among the
clouds; and had listened, without any necromancer's
help, to the conversation of a person who was several
hundred miles away, Sandy would not merely have
supposed me to be crazy, she would have thought she
knew it. Everybody around her believed in enchant-
ments; nobody had any doubts; to doubt that a castle
could be turned into a sty, and its occupants into hogs,
would have been the same as my doubting among Con-
necticut people the actuality of the telephone and its
wonders, -- and in both cases would be absolute proof
of a diseased mind, an unsettled reason. Yes, Sandy
was sane; that must be admitted. If I also would be
sane -- to Sandy -- I must keep my superstitions about
unenchanted and unmiraculous locomotives, balloons,
and telephones, to myself. Also, I believed that the
world was not flat, and hadn't pillars under it to sup-
port it, nor a canopy over it to turn off a universe of
water that occupied all space above; but as I was the
only person in the kingdom afflicted with such impious
and criminal opinions, I recognized that it would be
good wisdom to keep quiet about this matter, too, if I
did not wish to be suddenly shunned and forsaken by
everybody as a madman.

The next morning Sandy assembled the swine in the
dining-room and gave them their breakfast, waiting
upon them personally and manifesting in every way
the deep reverence which the natives of her island,
ancient and modern, have always felt for rank, let its
outward casket and the mental and moral contents be
what they may. I could have eaten with the hogs if I
had had birth approaching my lofty official rank; but
I hadn't, and so accepted the unavoidable slight and
made no complaint. Sandy and I had our breakfast at
the second table. The family were not at home. I
said:

"How many are in the family, Sandy, and where
do they keep themselves?"

"Family?"

"Yes."

"Which family, good my lord?"

"Why, this family; your own family."

"Sooth to say, I understand you not. I have no
family."

"No family? Why, Sandy, isn't this your home?"

"Now how indeed might that be? I have no home."

"Well, then, whose house is this?"

"Ah, wit you well I would tell you an I knew
myself."

"Come -- you don't even know these people?
Then who invited us here?"

"None invited us. We but came; that is all."

"Why, woman, this is a most extraordinary per-
formance. The effrontery of it is beyond admiration.
We blandly march into a man's house, and cram it
full of the only really valuable nobility the sun has yet
discovered in the earth, and then it turns out that we
don't even know the man's name. How did you ever
venture to take this extravagant liberty? I supposed,
of course, it was your home. What will the man say?"

"What will he say? Forsooth what can he say but
give thanks?"

"Thanks for what?"

Her face was filled with a puzzled surprise:

"Verily, thou troublest mine understanding with
strange words. Do ye dream that one of his estate is
like to have the honor twice in his life to entertain
company such as we have brought to grace his house
withal?"

"Well, no -- when you come to that. No, it's an
even bet that this is the first time he has had a treat
like this."

"Then let him be thankful, and manifest the same
by grateful speech and due humility; he were a dog,
else, and the heir and ancestor of dogs."

To my mind, the situation was uncomfortable. It
might become more so. It might be a good idea to
muster the hogs and move on. So I said:

"The day is wasting, Sandy. It is time to get the
nobility together and be moving."

"Wherefore, fair sir and Boss?"

"We want to take them to their home, don't we?"

"La, but list to him! They be of all the regions of
the earth! Each must hie to her own home; wend
you we might do all these journeys in one so brief life
as He hath appointed that created life, and thereto
death likewise with help of Adam, who by sin done
through persuasion of his helpmeet, she being wrought
upon and bewrayed by the beguilements of the great
enemy of man, that serpent hight Satan, aforetime
consecrated and set apart unto that evil work by over-
mastering spite and envy begotten in his heart through
fell ambitions that did blight and mildew a nature erst
so white and pure whenso it hove with the shining
multitudes its brethren-born in glade and shade of that
fair heaven wherein all such as native be to that rich
estate and --"

"Great Scott!"

"My lord?"

"Well, you know we haven't got time for this sort
of thing. Don't you see, we could distribute these
people around the earth in less time than it is going to
take you to explain that we can't. We mustn't talk
now, we must act. You want to be careful; you
mustn't let your mill get the start of you that way, at
a time like this. To business now -- and sharp's the
word. Who is to take the aristocracy home?"

"Even their friends. These will come for them
from the far parts of the earth."

This was lightning from a clear sky, for unexpected-
ness; and the relief of it was like pardon to a prisoner.
She would remain to deliver the goods, of course.

"Well, then, Sandy, as our enterprise is handsomely
and successfully ended, I will go home and report;
and if ever another one --"

"I also am ready; I will go with thee."

This was recalling the pardon.

"How? You will go with me? Why should you?"

"Will I be traitor to my knight, dost think? That
were dishonor. I may not part from thee until in
knightly encounter in the field some overmatching
champion shall fairly win and fairly wear me. I were
to blame an I thought that that might ever hap."

"Elected for the long term," I sighed to myself.
"I may as well make the best of it." So then I spoke
up and said:

"All right; let us make a start."

While she was gone to cry her farewells over the
pork, I gave that whole peerage away to the servants.
And I asked them to take a duster and dust around a
little where the nobilities had mainly lodged and prom-
enaded; but they considered that that would be hardly
worth while, and would moreover be a rather grave
departure from custom, and therefore likely to make
talk. A departure from custom -- that settled it; it
was a nation capable of committing any crime but
that. The servants said they would follow the fashion,
a fashion grown sacred through immemorial observ-
ance; they would scatter fresh rushes in all the rooms
and halls, and then the evidence of the aristocratic
visitation would be no longer visible. It was a kind of
satire on Nature: it was the scientific method, the
geologic method; it deposited the history of the family
in a stratified record; and the antiquary could dig
through it and tell by the remains of each period what
changes of diet the family had introduced successively
for a hundred years.

The first thing we struck that day was a procession
of pilgrims. It was not going our way, but we joined
it, nevertheless; for it was hourly being borne in
upon me now, that if I would govern this country
wisely, I must be posted in the details of its life,
and not at second hand, but by personal observation
and scrutiny.

This company of pilgrims resembled Chaucer's in
this: that it had in it a sample of about all the upper
occupations and professions the country could show,
and a corresponding variety of costume. There were
young men and old men, young women and old
women, lively folk and grave folk. They rode upon
mules and horses, and there was not a side-saddle in
the party; for this specialty was to remain unknown in
England for nine hundred years yet.

It was a pleasant, friendly, sociable herd; pious,
happy, merry and full of unconscious coarsenesses and
innocent indecencies. What they regarded as the
merry tale went the continual round and caused no
more embarrassment than it would have caused in the
best English society twelve centuries later. Practical
jokes worthy of the English wits of the first quarter of
the far-off nineteenth century were sprung here and
there and yonder along the line, and compelled the
delightedest applause; and sometimes when a bright
remark was made at one end of the procession and
started on its travels toward the other, you could note
its progress all the way by the sparkling spray of
laughter it threw off from its bows as it plowed along;
and also by the blushes of the mules in its wake.

Sandy knew the goal and purpose of this pilgrimage,
and she posted me. She said:

"They journey to the Valley of Holiness, for to be
blessed of the godly hermits and drink of the miracu-
lous waters and be cleased from sin."

"Where is this watering place?"

"It lieth a two-day journey hence, by the borders
of the land that hight the Cuckoo Kingdom."

"Tell me about it. Is it a celebrated place?"

"Oh, of a truth, yes. There be none more so. Of
old time there lived there an abbot and his monks.
Belike were none in the world more holy than these;
for they gave themselves to study of pious books, and
spoke not the one to the other, or indeed to any, and
ate decayed herbs and naught thereto, and slept hard,
and prayed much, and washed never; also they wore
the same garment until it fell from their bodies through
age and decay. Right so came they to be known of
all the world by reason of these holy austerities, and
visited by rich and poor, and reverenced."

"Proceed."

"But always there was lack of water there. Whereas,
upon a time, the holy abbot prayed, and for answer
a great stream of clear water burst forth by miracle
in a desert place. Now were the fickle monks tempted
of the Fiend, and they wrought with their abbot un-
ceasingly by beggings and beseechings that he would
construct a bath; and when he was become aweary and
might not resist more, he said have ye your will, then,
and granted that they asked. Now mark thou what
'tis to forsake the ways of purity the which He loveth,
and wanton with such as be worldly and an offense.
These monks did enter into the bath and come thence
washed as white as snow; and lo, in that moment His
sign appeared, in miraculous rebuke! for His insulted
waters ceased to flow, and utterly vanished away."

"They fared mildly, Sandy, considering how that
kind of crime is regarded in this country."

"Belike; but it was their first sin; and they had
been of perfect life for long, and differing in naught
from the angels. Prayers, tears, torturings of the
flesh, all was vain to beguile that water to flow again.
Even processions; even burnt-offerings; even votive
candles to the Virgin, did fail every each of them;
and all in the land did marvel."

"How odd to find that even this industry has its
financial panics, and at times sees its assignats and
greenbacks languish to zero, and everything come to a
standstill. Go on, Sandy."

"And so upon a time, after year and day, the good
abbot made humble surrender and destroyed the bath.
And behold, His anger was in that moment appeased,
and the waters gushed richly forth again, and even
unto this day they have not ceased to flow in that
generous measure."

"Then I take it nobody has washed since."

"He that would essay it could have his halter free;
yes, and swiftly would he need it, too."

"The community has prospered since?"

"Even from that very day. The fame of the miracle
went abroad into all lands. From every land came
monks to join; they came even as the fishes come, in
shoals; and the monastery added building to building,
and yet others to these, and so spread wide its arms
and took them in. And nuns came, also; and more
again, and yet more; and built over against the mon-
astery on the yon side of the vale, and added building
to building, until mighty was that nunnery. And
these were friendly unto those, and they joined their
loving labors together, and together they built a fair
great foundling asylum midway of the valley between."

"You spoke of some hermits, Sandy."

"These have gathered there from the ends of the
earth. A hermit thriveth best where there be multi-
tudes of pilgrims. Ye shall not find no hermit of no
sort wanting. If any shall mention a hermit of a kind
he thinketh new and not to be found but in some far
strange land, let him but scratch among the holes and
caves and swamps that line that Valley of Holiness,
and whatsoever be his breed, it skills not, he shall find
a sample of it there."

I closed up alongside of a burly fellow with a fat
good-humored face, purposing to make myself agree-
able and pick up some further crumbs of fact; but I
had hardly more than scraped acquaintance with him
when he began eagerly and awkwardly to lead up, in
the immemorial way, to that same old anecdote -- the
one Sir Dinadan told me, what time I got into trouble
with Sir Sagramor and was challenged of him on ac-
count of it. I excused myself and dropped to the rear
of the procession, sad at heart, willing to go hence
from this troubled life, this vale of tears, this brief day
of broken rest, of cloud and storm, of weary struggle
and monotonous defeat; and yet shrinking from the
change, as remembering how long eternity is, and how
many have wended thither who know that anecdote.

Early in the afternoon we overtook another proces-
sion of pilgrims; but in this one was no merriment, no
jokes, no laughter, no playful ways, nor any happy
giddiness, whether of youth or age. Yet both were
here, both age and youth; gray old men and women,
strong men and women of middle age, young hus-
bands, young wives, little boys and girls, and three
babies at the breast. Even the children were smileless;
there was not a face among all these half a hundred
people but was cast down, and bore that set expression
of hopelessness which is bred of long and hard trials
and old acquaintance with despair. They were slaves.
Chains led from their fettered feet and their manacled
hands to a sole-leather belt about their waists; and all
except the children were also linked together in a file
six feet apart, by a single chain which led from collar
to collar all down the line. They were on foot, and
had tramped three hundred miles in eighteen days,
upon the cheapest odds and ends of food, and stingy
rations of that. They had slept in these chains every
night, bundled together like swine. They had upon
their bodies some poor rags, but they could not be
said to be clothed. Their irons had chafed the skin
from their ankles and made sores which were ulcerated
and wormy. Their naked feet were torn, and none
walked without a limp. Originally there had been a
hundred of these unfortunates, but about half had been
sold on the trip. The trader in charge of them rode
a horse and carried a whip with a short handle and a
long heavy lash divided into several knotted tails at the
end. With this whip he cut the shoulders of any that
tottered from weariness and pain, and straightened
them up. He did not speak; the whip conveyed his
desire without that. None of these poor creatures
looked up as we rode along by; they showed no con-
sciousness of our presence. And they made no sound
but one; that was the dull and awful clank of their
chains from end to end of the long file, as forty-three
burdened feet rose and fell in unison. The file moved
in a cloud of its own making.

All these faces were gray with a coating of dust.
One has seen the like of this coating upon furniture in
unoccupied houses, and has written his idle thought in
it with his finger. I was reminded of this when I
noticed the faces of some of those women, young
mothers carrying babes that were near to death and
freedom, how a something in their hearts was written
in the dust upon their faces, plain to see, and lord, how
plain to read! for it was the track of tears. One of
these young mothers was but a girl, and it hurt me to
the heart to read that writing, and reflect that it was
come up out of the breast of such a child, a breast
that ought not to know trouble yet, but only the glad-
ness of the morning of life; and no doubt --

She reeled just then, giddy with fatigue, and down
came the lash and flicked a flake of skin from her
naked shoulder. It stung me as if I had been hit in-
stead. The master halted the file and jumped from his
horse. He stormed and swore at this girl, and said
she had made annoyance enough with her laziness, and
as this was the last chance he should have, he would
settle the account now. She dropped on her knees
and put up her hands and began to beg, and cry, and
implore, in a passion of terror, but the master gave no
attention. He snatched the child from her, and then
made the men-slaves who were chained before and
behind her throw her on the ground and hold her there
and expose her body; and then he laid on with his
lash like a madman till her back was flayed, she shriek-
ing and struggling the while piteously. One of the
men who was holding her turned away his face, and
for this humanity he was reviled and flogged.

All our pilgrims looked on and commented -- on the
expert way in which the whip was handled. They
were too much hardened by lifelong everyday familiar-
ity with slavery to notice that there was anything else
in the exhibition that invited comment. This was what
slavery could do, in the way of ossifying what one may
call the superior lobe of human feeling; for these pil-
grims were kind-hearted people, and they would not
have allowed that man to treat a horse like that.

I wanted to stop the whole thing and set the slaves
free, but that would not do. I must not interfere too
much and get myself a name for riding over the
country's laws and the citizen's rights roughshod. If
I lived and prospered I would be the death of slavery,
that I was resolved upon; but I would try to fix it so
that when I became its executioner it should be by
command of the nation.

Just here was the wayside shop of a smith; and now
arrived a landed proprietor who had bought this girl a
few miles back, deliverable here where her irons could
be taken off. They were removed; then there was a
squabble between the gentleman and the dealer as to
which should pay the blacksmith. The moment the
girl was delivered from her irons, she flung herself, all
tears and frantic sobbings, into the arms of the slave
who had turned away his face when she was whipped.
He strained her to his breast, and smothered her
face and the child's with kisses, and washed them
with the rain of his tears. I suspected. I inquired.
Yes, I was right; it was husband and wife. They had
to be torn apart by force; the girl had to be dragged
away, and she struggled and fought and shrieked like
one gone mad till a turn of the road hid her from
sight; and even after that, we could still make out the
fading plaint of those receding shrieks. And the hus-
band and father, with his wife and child gone, never to
be seen by him again in life? -- well, the look of him
one might not bear at all, and so I turned away; but I
knew I should never get his picture out of my mind
again, and there it is to this day, to wring my heart-
strings whenever I think of it.

We put up at the inn in a village just at nightfall,
and when I rose next morning and looked abroad, I
was ware where a knight came riding in the golden
glory of the new day, and recognized him for knight
of mine -- Sir Ozana le Cure Hardy. He was in the
gentlemen's furnishing line, and his missionarying
specialty was plug hats. He was clothed all in steel,
in the beautifulest armor of the time -- up to where his
helmet ought to have been; but he hadn't any helmet,
he wore a shiny stove-pipe hat, and was ridiculous a
spectacle as one might want to see. It was another of
my surreptitious schemes for extinguishing knighthood
by making it grotesque and absurd. Sir Ozana's sad-
dle was hung about with leather hat boxes, and every
time he overcame a wandering knight he swore him
into my service and fitted him with a plug and made
him wear it. I dressed and ran down to welcome Sir
Ozana and get his news.

"How is trade?" I asked.

"Ye will note that I have but these four left; yet
were they sixteen whenas I got me from Camelot."

"Why, you have certainly done nobly, Sir Ozana.
Where have you been foraging of late?"

"I am but now come from the Valley of Holiness,
please you sir."

"I am pointed for that place myself. Is there
anything stirring in the monkery, more than com-
mon?"

"By the mass ye may not question it!.... Give him
good feed, boy, and stint it not, an thou valuest thy
crown; so get ye lightly to the stable and do even as I
bid......  Sir, it is parlous news I bring, and -- be
these pilgrims? Then ye may not do better, good
folk, than gather and hear the tale I have to tell, sith it
concerneth you, forasmuch as ye go to find that ye
will not find, and seek that ye will seek in vain, my life
being hostage for my word, and my word and message
being these, namely: That a hap has happened where-
of the like has not been seen no more but once this
two hundred years, which was the first and last time
that that said misfortune strake the holy valley in that
form by commandment of the Most High whereto by
reasons just and causes thereunto contributing, wherein
the matter --"

"The miraculous fount hath ceased to flow!" This
shout burst from twenty pilgrim mouths at once.

"Ye say well, good people. I was verging to it,
even when ye spake. "

"Has somebody been washing again?"

"Nay, it is suspected, but none believe it. It is
thought to be some other sin, but none wit what."

"How are they feeling about the calamity?"

"None may describe it in words. The fount is
these nine days dry. The prayers that did begin then,
and the lamentations in sackcloth and ashes, and the
holy processions, none of these have ceased nor night
nor day; and so the monks and the nuns and the
foundlings be all exhausted, and do hang up prayers
writ upon parchment, sith that no strength is left in
man to lift up voice. And at last they sent for thee,
Sir Boss, to try magic and enchantment; and if you
could not come, then was the messenger to fetch
Merlin, and he is there these three days now, and
saith he will fetch that water though he burst the globe
and wreck its kingdoms to accomplish it; and right
bravely doth he work his magic and call upon his
hellions to hie them hither and help, but not a whiff
of moisture hath he started yet, even so much as might
qualify as mist upon a copper mirror an ye count not
the barrel of sweat he sweateth betwixt sun and sun
over the dire labors of his task; and if ye --"

Breakfast was ready. As soon as it was over I
showed to Sir Ozana these words which I had written
on the inside of his hat: Chemical Department, Labor-
atory extension, Section G. Pxxp. Send two of first
size, two of No. 3, and six of No. 4, together with the
proper complementary details -- and two of my trained
assistants." And I said:

"Now get you to Camelot as fast as you can fly,
brave knight, and show the writing to Clarence, and
tell him to have these required matters in the Valley of
Holiness with all possible dispatch."

"I will well, Sir Boss," and he was off.


CHAPTER XXII.
THE HOLY FOUNTAIN

THE pilgrims were human beings. Otherwise they
would have acted differently. They had come a
long and difficult journey, and now when the journey
was nearly finished, and they learned that the main
thing they had come for had ceased to exist, they
didn't do as horses or cats or angle-worms would
probably have done -- turn back and get at something
profitable -- no, anxious as they had before been to
see the miraculous fountain, they were as much as
forty times as anxious now to see the place where it
had used to be. There is no accounting for human
beings.

We made good time; and  a couple of hours before
sunset we stood upon the high confines of the Valley
of Holiness, and our eyes swept it from end to end
and noted its features. That is, its large features.
These were the three masses of buildings. They were
distant and isolated temporalities shrunken to toy con-
structions in the lonely waste of what seemed a desert
-- and was. Such a scene is always mournful, it is so
impressively still, and looks so steeped in death. But
there was a sound here which interrupted the stillness
only to add to its mournfulness; this was the faint far
sound of tolling bells which floated fitfully to us on the
passing breeze, and so faintly, so softly, that we hardly
knew whether we heard it with our ears or with our
spirits.

We reached the monastery before dark, and there
the males were given lodging, but the women were sent
over to the nunnery. The bells were close at hand
now, and their solemn booming smote upon the ear
like a message of doom. A superstitious despair pos-
sessed the heart of every monk and published itself
in his ghastly face. Everywhere, these black-robed,
soft-sandaled, tallow-visaged specters appeared, flitted
about and disappeared, noiseless as the creatures of a
troubled dream, and as uncanny.

The old abbot's joy to see me was pathetic. Even
to tears; but he did the shedding himself. He said:

"Delay not, son, but get to thy saving work. An
we bring not the water back again, and soon, we are
ruined, and the good work of two hundred years must
end. And see thou do it with enchantments that be
holy, for the Church will not endure that work in her
cause be done by devil's magic."

"When I work, Father, be sure there will be no
devil's work connected with it. I shall use no arts
that come of the devil, and no elements not created
by the hand of God. But is Merlin working strictly
on pious lines?"

"Ah, he said he would, my son, he said he would,
and took oath to make his promise good."

"Well, in that case, let him proceed."

"But surely you will not sit idle by, but help?"

"It will not answer to mix methods, Father; neither
would it be professional courtesy. Two of a trade
must not underbid each other. We might as well cut
rates and be done with it; it would arrive at that in
the end. Merlin has the contract; no other magician
can touch it till he throws it up."

"But I will take it from him; it is a terrible emer-
gency and the act is thereby justified. And if it were
not so, who will give law to the Church? The Church
giveth law to all; and what she wills to do, that she
may do, hurt whom it may. I will take it from him;
you shall begin upon the moment."

"It may not be, Father. No doubt, as you say,
where power is supreme, one can do as one likes and
suffer no injury; but we poor magicians are not so
situated. Merlin is a very good magician in a small
way, and has quite a neat provincial reputation. He
is struggling along, doing the best he can, and it would
not be etiquette for me to take his job until he himself
abandons it."

The abbot's face lighted.

"Ah, that is simple. There are ways to persuade
him to abandon it."

"No-no, Father, it skills not, as these people say.
If he were persuaded against his will, he would load
that well with a malicious enchantment which would
balk me until I found out its secret. It might take a
month. I could set up a little enchantment of mine
which I call the telephone, and he could not find out
its secret in a hundred years. Yes, you perceive, he
might block me for a month. Would you like to risk a
month in a dry time like this?"

"A month! The mere thought of it maketh me to
shudder. Have it thy way, my son. But my heart is
heavy with this disappointment. Leave me, and let
me wear my spirit with weariness and waiting, even as
I have done these ten long days, counterfeiting thus
the thing that is called rest, the prone body making
outward sign of repose where inwardly is none."

Of course, it would have been best, all round, for
Merlin to waive etiquette and quit and call it half a
day, since he would never be able to start that water,
for he was a true magician of the time; which is to
say, the big miracles, the ones that gave him his repu-
tation, always had the luck to be performed when
nobody but Merlin was present; he couldn't start this
well with all this crowd around to see; a crowd was as
bad for a magician's miracle in that day as it was for a
spiritualist's miracle in mine; there was sure to be
some skeptic on hand to turn up the gas at the crucial
moment and spoil everything. But I did not want
Merlin to retire from the job until I was ready to take
hold of it effectively myself; and I could not do that
until I got my things from Camelot, and that would
take two or three days.

My presence gave the monks hope, and cheered
them up a good deal; insomuch that they ate a square
meal that night for the first time in ten days. As
soon as their stomachs had been properly reinforced
with food, their spirits began to rise fast; when the
mead began to go round they rose faster. By the
time everybody was half-seas over, the holy com-
munity was in good shape to make a night of it; so
we stayed by the board and put it through on that
line. Matters got to be very jolly. Good old ques-
tionable stories were told that made the tears run down
and cavernous mouths stand wide and the round bellies
shake with laughter; and questionable songs were
bellowed out in a mighty chorus that drowned the
boom of the tolling bells.

At last I ventured a story myself; and vast was the
success of it. Not right off, of course, for the native
of those islands does not, as a rule, dissolve upon the
early applications of a humorous thing; but the fifth
time I told it, they began to crack in places; the eight
time I told it, they began to crumble; at the twelfth
repetition they fell apart in chunks; and at the fifteenth
they disintegrated, and I got a broom and swept them
up. This language is figurative. Those islanders --
well, they are slow pay at first, in the matter of return
for your investment of effort, but in the end they make
the pay of all other nations poor and small by contrast.

I was at the well next day betimes. Merlin was
there, enchanting away like a beaver, but not raising
the moisture. He was not in a pleasant humor; and
every time I hinted that perhaps this contract was a
shade too hefty for a novice he unlimbered his tongue
and cursed like a bishop -- French bishop of the
Regency days, I mean.

Matters were about as I expected to find them.
The "fountain" was an ordinary well, it had been dug
in the ordinary way, and stoned up in the ordinary
way. There was no miracle about it. Even the lie
that had created its reputation was not miraculous; I
could have told it myself, with one hand tied behind
me. The well was in a dark chamber which stood in
the center of a cut-stone chapel, whose walls were
hung with pious pictures of a workmanship that would
have made a chromo feel good; pictures historically
commemorative of curative miracles which had been
achieved by the waters when nobody was looking.
That is, nobody but angels; they are always on deck
when there is a miracle to the fore -- so as to get put
in the picture, perhaps. Angels are as fond of that as
a fire company; look at the old masters.

The well-chamber was dimly lighted by lamps; the
water was drawn with a windlass and chain by monks,
and poured into troughs which delivered it into stone
reservoirs outside in the chapel -- when there was
water to draw, I mean -- and none but monks could
enter the well-chamber. I entered it, for I had tempo-
rary authority to do so, by courtesy of my professional
brother and subordinate. But he hadn't entered it
himself. He did everything by incantations; he never
worked his intellect. If he had stepped in there and
used his eyes, instead of his disordered mind, he could
have cured the well by natural means, and then turned
it into a miracle in the customary way; but no, he was
an old numskull, a magician who believed in his own
magic; and no magician can thrive who is handicapped
with a superstition like that.

I had an idea that the well had sprung a leak; that
some of the wall stones near the bottom had fallen and
exposed fissures that allowed the water to escape. I
measured the chain -- 98 feet. Then I called in
couple of monks, locked the door, took a candle, and
made them lower me in the bucket. When the chain
was all paid out, the candle confirmed my suspicion;
a considerable section of the wall was gone, exposing a
good big fissure.

I almost regretted that my theory about the well's
trouble was correct, because I had another one that
had a showy point or two about it for a miracle. I
remembered that in America, many centuries later,
when an oil well ceased to flow, they used to blast it
out with a dynamite torpedo. If I should find this
well dry and no explanation of it, I could astonish
these people most nobly by having a person of no
especial value drop a dynamite bomb into it. It was
my idea to appoint Merlin. However, it was plain
that there was no occasion for the bomb. One cannot
have everything the way he would like it. A man has
no business to be depressed by a disappointment, any-
way; he ought to make up his mind to get even.
That is what I did. I said to myself, I am in no
hurry, I can wait; that bomb will come good yet.
And it did, too.

When I was above ground again, I turned out the
monks, and let down a fish-line; the well was a hun-
dred and fifty feet deep, and there was forty-one feet
of water in it I I called in a monk and asked:

A Yankee in King Arthur's Court     187

"How deep is the well?"

"That, sir, I wit not, having never been told."

"How does the water usually stand in it?"

"Near to the top, these two centuries, as the testi-
mony goeth, brought down to us through our prede-
cessors."

It was true -- as to recent times at least -- for there
was witness to it, and better witness than a monk;
only about twenty or thirty feet of the chain showed
wear and use, the rest of it was unworn and rusty.
What had happened when the well gave out that other
time? Without doubt some practical person had come
along and mended the leak, and then had come up and
told the abbot he had discovered by divination that if
the sinful bath were destroyed the well would flow
again. The leak had befallen again now, and these
children would have prayed, and processioned, and
tolled their bells for heavenly succor till they all dried
up and blew away, and no innocent of them all would
ever have thought to drop a fish-line into the well or
go down in it and find out what was really the matter.
Old habit of mind is one of the toughest things to
get away from in the world. It transmits itself like
physical form and feature; and for a man, in those
days, to have had an idea that his ancestors hadn't
had, would have brought him under suspicion of being
illegitimate. I said to the monk:

"It is a difficult miracle to restore water in a dry
well, but we will try, if my brother Merlin fails.
Brother Merlin is a very passable artist, but only in the
parlor-magic line, and he may not succeed; in fact, is
not likely to succeed. But that should be nothing to
his discredit; the man that can do THIS kind of miracle
knows enough to keep hotel."

"Hotel? I mind not to have heard --"

"Of hotel? It's what you call hostel. The man
that can do this miracle can keep hostel. I can do this
miracle; I shall do this miracle; yet I do not try to
conceal from you that it is a miracle to tax the occult
powers to the last strain."

"None knoweth that truth better than the brother-
hood, indeed; for it is of record that aforetime it was
parlous difficult and took a year. Natheless, God send
you good success, and to that end will we pray."

As a matter of business it was a good idea to get the
notion around that the thing was difficult. Many a
small thing has been made large by the right kind of
advertising. That monk was filled up with the diffi-
culty of this enterprise; he would fill up the others.
In two days the solicitude would be booming.

On my way home at noon, I met Sandy. She had
been sampling the hermits. I said:

"I would like to do that myself. This is Wednes-
day. Is there a matinee?"

"A which, please you, sir?"

"Matinee. Do they keep open afternoons?"

"Who?"

"The hermits, of course."

"Keep open?"

"Yes, keep open. Isn't that plain enough? Do
they knock off at noon?"

"Knock off?"

"Knock off? -- yes, knock off. What is the matter
with knock off? I never saw such a dunderhead;
can't you understand anything at all? In plain terms,
do they shut up shop, draw the game, bank the
fires --"

"Shut up shop, draw --"

"There, never mind, let it go; you make me tired.
You can't seem to understand the simplest thing."

I would I might please thee, sir, and it is to me
dole and sorrow that I fail, albeit sith I am but a
simple damsel and taught of none, being from the
cradle unbaptized in those deep waters of learning that
do anoint with a sovereignty him that partaketh of that
most noble sacrament, investing him with reverend
state to the mental eye of the humble mortal who, by
bar and lack of that great consecration seeth in his
own unlearned estate but a symbol of that other sort
of lack and loss which men do publish to the pitying
eye with sackcloth trappings whereon the ashes of
grief do lie bepowdered and bestrewn, and so, when
such shall in the darkness of his mind encounter these
golden phrases of high mystery, these shut-up-shops,
and draw-the-game, and bank-the-fires, it is but by the
grace of God that he burst not for envy of the mind
that can beget, and tongue that can deliver so great
and mellow-sounding miracles of speech, and if there
do ensue confusion in that humbler mind, and failure
to divine the meanings of these wonders, then if so be
this miscomprehension is not vain but sooth and true,
wit ye well it is the very substance of worshipful dear
homage and may not lightly be misprized, nor had
been, an ye had noted this complexion of mood
and mind and understood that that I would I could
not, and that I could not I might not, nor yet nor
might NOR could, nor might-not nor could-not, might
be by advantage turned to the desired WOULD, and so I
pray you mercy of my fault, and that ye will of your
kindness and your charity forgive it, good my master
and most dear lord."

I couldn't make it all out -- that is, the details -- but
I got the general idea; and enough of it, too, to be
ashamed. It was not fair to spring those nineteenth
century technicalities upon the untutored infant of the
sixth and then rail at her because she couldn't get
their drift; and when she was making the honest best
drive at it she could, too, and no fault of hers that she
couldn't fetch the home plate; and so I apologized.
Then we meandered pleasantly away toward the hermit
holes in sociable converse together, and better friends
than ever.

I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and
shuddery reverence for this girl; nowadays whenever
she pulled out from the station and got her train fairly
started on one of those horizonless transcontinental
sentences of hers, it was borne in upon me that I was
standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the
German Language. I was so impressed with this, that
sometimes when she began to empty one of these sen-
tences on me I unconsciously took the very attitude of
reverence, and stood uncovered; and if words had
been water, I had been drowned, sure. She had ex-
actly the German way; whatever was in her mind to
be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or
a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it
into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary
German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are
going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of
his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

We drifted from hermit to hermit all the afternoon.
It was a most strange menagerie. The chief emulation
among them seemed to be, to see which could manage
to be the uncleanest and most prosperous with vermin.
Their manner and attitudes were the last expression of
complacent self-righteousness. It was one anchorite's
pride to lie naked in the mud and let the insects bite
him and blister him unmolested; it was another's to
lean against a rock, all day long, conspicuous to the
admiration of the throng of pilgrims and pray; it was
another's to go naked and crawl around on all fours;
it was another's to drag about with him, year in and
year out, eighty pounds of iron; it was another's to
never lie down when he slept, but to stand among the
thorn-bushes and snore when there were pilgrims
around to look; a woman, who had the white hair of
age, and no other apparel, was black from crown to
heel with forty-seven years of holy abstinence from
water. Groups of gazing pilgrims stood around all
and every of these strange objects, lost in reverent
wonder, and envious of the fleckless sanctity which
these pious austerities had won for them from an
exacting heaven.

By and by we went to see one of the supremely
great ones. He was a mighty celebrity; his fame had
penetrated all Christendom; the noble and the re-
nowned journeyed from the remotest lands on the
globe to pay him reverence. His stand was in the
center of the widest part of the valley; and it took all
that space to hold his crowds.

His stand was a pillar sixty feet high, with a broad
platform on the top of it. He was now doing what he
had been doing every day for twenty years up there --
bowing his body ceaselessly and rapidly almost to his
feet. It was his way of praying. I timed him with a
stop watch, and he made 1,244 revolutions in 24 min-
utes and 46 seconds. It seemed a pity to have all this
power going to waste. It was one of the most useful
motions in mechanics, the pedal movement; so I made
a note in my memorandum book, purposing some day
to apply a system of elastic cords to him and run a
sewing machine with it. I afterward carried out that
scheme, and got five years' good service out of him;
in which time he turned out upward of eighteen thou-
sand first-rate tow-linen shirts, which was ten a day. I
worked him Sundays and all; he was going, Sundays,
the same as week days, and it was no use to waste the
power. These shirts cost me nothing but just the mere
trifle for the materials -- I furnished those myself, it
would not have been right to make him do that -- and
they sold like smoke to pilgrims at a dollar and a half
apiece, which was the price of fifty cows or a blooded
race horse in Arthurdom. They were regarded as a
perfect protection against sin, and advertised as such
by my knights everywhere, with the paint-pot and
stencil-plate; insomuch that there was not a cliff or a
bowlder or a dead wall in England but you could read
on it at a mile distance:

  "Buy the only genuine St. Stylite; patronized by the
  Nobility. Patent applied for."

There was more money in the business than one
knew what to do with. As it extended, I brought out
a line of goods suitable for kings, and a nobby thing
for duchesses and that sort, with ruffles down the fore-
hatch and the running-gear clewed up with a feather-
stitch to leeward and then hauled aft with a back-stay
and triced up with a half-turn in the standing rigging
forward of the weather-gaskets. Yes, it was a daisy.

But about that time I noticed that the motive power
had taken to standing on one leg, and I found that
there was something the matter with the other one; so
I stocked the business and unloaded, taking Sir Bors
de Ganis into camp financially along with certain of his
friends; for the works stopped within a year, and the
good saint got him to his rest. But he had earned it.
I can say that for him.

When I saw him that first time -- however, his per-
sonal condition will not quite bear description here.
You can read it in the Lives of the Saints. *

[* All the details concerning the hermits, in this
chapter, are from Lecky -- but greatly modified. This
book not being a history but only a tale, the majority
of the historian's frank details were too strong for
reproduction in it. - EDITOR]


CHAPTER XXIII.
RESTORATION OF THE FOUNTAIN

SATURDAY noon I went to the well and looked on
a while. Merlin was still burning smoke-powders,
and pawing the air, and muttering gibberish as hard as
ever, but looking pretty down-hearted, for of course
he had not started even a perspiration in that well yet.
Finally I said:

"How does the thing promise by this time, partner?"

"Behold, I am even now busied with trial of the
powerfulest enchantment known to the princes of the oc-
cult arts in the lands of the East; an it fail me, naught
can avail. Peace, until I finish."

He raised a smoke this time that darkened all the
region, and must have made matters uncomfortable for
the hermits, for the wind was their way, and it rolled
down over their dens in a dense and billowy fog. He
poured out volumes of speech to match, and contorted
his body and sawed the air with his hands in a most
extraordinary way. At the end of twenty minutes he
dropped down panting, and about exhausted. Now
arrived the abbot and several hundred monks and nuns,
and behind them a multitude of pilgrims and a couple
of acres of foundlings, all drawn by the prodigious smoke,
and all in a grand state of excitement. The abbot
inquired anxiously for results. Merlin said:

"If any labor of mortal might break the spell that
binds these waters, this which I have but just essayed
had done it. It has failed; whereby I do now know
that that which I had feared is a truth established; the
sign of this failure is, that the most potent spirit known
to the magicians of the East, and whose name none
may utter and live, has laid his spell upon this well.
The mortal does not breathe, nor ever will, who can
penetrate the secret of that spell, and without that
secret none can break it. The water will flow no more
forever, good Father. I have done what man could.
Suffer me to go."

Of course this threw the abbot into a good deal of a
consternation. He turned to me with the signs of it in
his face, and said:

"Ye have heard him. Is it true?"

"Part of it is."

"Not all, then, not all! What part is true?"

"That that spirit with the Russian name has put his
spell upon the well."

"God's wownds, then are we ruined!"

"Possibly."

"But not certainly? Ye mean, not certainly?"

"That is it."

"Wherefore, ye also mean that when he saith none
can break the spell --"

"Yes, when he says that, he says what isn't neces-
sarily true. There are conditions under which an effort
to break it may have some chance -- that is, some
small, some trifling chance -- of success."

"The conditions --"

"Oh, they are nothing difficult. Only these: I
want the well and the surroundings for the space of
half a mile, entirely to myself from sunset to-day until
I remove the ban -- and nobody allowed to cross the
ground but by my authority."

"Are these all?"

"Yes."

"And you have no fear to try?"

"Oh, none. One may fail, of course; and one
may also succeed. One can try, and I am ready to
chance it. I have my conditions?"

"These and all others ye may name. I will issue
commandment to that effect."

"Wait," said Merlin, with an evil smile. "Ye
wit that he that would break this spell must know that
spirit's name?"

"Yes, I know his name."

"And wit you also that to know it skills not of
itself, but ye must likewise pronounce it? Ha-ha!
Knew ye that?"

"Yes, I knew that, too."

"You had that knowledge! Art a fool? Are ye
minded to utter that name and die?"

"Utter it? Why certainly. I would utter it if it
was Welsh."

"Ye are even a dead man, then; and I go to
tell Arthur."

"That's all right. Take your gripsack and get
along. The thing for YOU to do is to go home and
work the weather, John W. Merlin."

It was a home shot, and it made him wince; for he
was the worst weather-failure in the kingdom. When-
ever he ordered up the danger-signals along the coast
there was a week's dead calm, sure, and every time he
prophesied fair weather it rained brickbats. But I kept
him in the weather bureau right along, to undermine
his reputation. However, that shot raised his bile, and
instead of starting home to report my death, he said
he would remain and enjoy it.

My two experts arrived in the evening, and pretty
well fagged, for they had traveled double tides. They
had pack-mules along, and had brought everything I
needed -- tools, pump, lead pipe, Greek fire, sheaves
of big rockets, roman candles, colored fire sprays,
electric apparatus, and a lot of sundries -- everything
necessary for the stateliest kind of a miracle. They
got their supper and a nap, and about midnight we
sallied out through a solitude so wholly vacant and
complete that it quite overpassed the required condi-
tions. We took possession of the well and its sur-
roundings. My boys were experts in all sorts of
things, from the stoning up of a well to the construct-
ing of a mathematical instrument. An hour before
sunrise we had that leak mended in ship-shape fashion,
and the water began to rise. Then we stowed our fire-
works in the chapel, locked up the place, and went
home to bed.

Before the noon mass was over, we were at the well
again; for there was a deal to do yet, and I was deter-
mined to spring the miracle before midnight, for busi-
ness reasons: for whereas a miracle worked for the
Church on a week-day is worth a good deal, it is worth
six times as much if you get it in on a Sunday. In
nine hours the water had risen to its customary level --
that is to say, it was within twenty-three feet of the
top. We put in a little iron pump, one of the first
turned out by my works near the capital; we bored
into a stone reservoir which stood against the outer
wall of the well-chamber and inserted a section of lead
pipe that was long enough to reach to the door of the
chapel and project beyond the threshold, where the
gushing water would be visible to the two hundred and
fifty acres of people I was intending should be present
on the flat plain in front of this little holy hillock at
the proper time.

We knocked the head out of an empty hogshead and
hoisted this hogshead to the flat roof of the chapel,
where we clamped it down fast, poured in gunpowder
till it lay loosely an inch deep on the bottom, then we
stood up rockets in the hogshead as thick as they
could loosely stand, all the different breeds of rockets
there are; and they made a portly and imposing sheaf,
I can tell you. We grounded the wire of a pocket
electrical battery in that powder, we placed a whole
magazine of Greek fire on each corner of the roof --
blue on one corner, green on another, red on another,
and purple on the last -- and grounded a wire in each.

About two hundred yards off, in the flat, we built a
pen of scantlings, about four feet high, and laid planks
on it, and so made a platform. We covered it with
swell tapestries borrowed for the occasion, and topped
it off with the abbot's own throne. When you are
going to do a miracle for an ignorant race, you want
to get in every detail that will count; you want to
make all the properties impressive to the public eye;
you want to make matters comfortable for your head
guest; then you can turn yourself loose and play your
effects for all they are worth. I know the value of
these things, for I know human nature. You can't
throw too much style into a miracle. It costs trouble,
and work, and sometimes money; but it pays in the
end. Well, we brought the wires to the ground at the
chapel, and then brought them under the ground to
the platform, and hid the batteries there. We put a
rope fence a hundred feet square around the platform
to keep off the common multitude, and that finished
the work. My idea was, doors open at 10:30, per-
formance to begin at 11:25 sharp. I wished I could
charge admission, but of course that wouldn't answer.
I instructed my boys to be in the chapel as early as
10, before anybody was around, and be ready to man
the pumps at the proper time, and make the fur fly.
Then we went home to supper.

The news of the disaster to the well had traveled far
by this time; and now for two or three days a steady
avalanche of people had been pouring into the valley.
The lower end of the valley was become one huge
camp; we should have a good house, no question
about that. Criers went the rounds early in the eve-
ning and announced the coming attempt, which put
every pulse up to fever heat. They gave notice that
the abbot and his official suite would move in state and
occupy the platform at 10:30, up to which time all the
region which was under my ban must be clear; the
bells would then cease from tolling, and this sign
should be permission to the multitudes to close in and
take their places.

I was at the platform and all ready to do the honors
when the abbot's solemn procession hove in sight --
which it did not do till it was nearly to the rope fence,
because it was a starless black night and no torches
permitted. With it came Merlin, and took a front seat
on the platform; he was as good as his word for once.
One could not see the multitudes banked together be-
yond the ban, but they were there, just the same.
The moment the bells stopped, those banked masses
broke and poured over the line like a vast black wave,
and for as much as a half hour it continued to flow,
and then it solidified itself, and you could have walked
upon a pavement of human heads to -- well, miles.

We had a solemn stage-wait, now, for about twenty
minutes -- a thing I had counted on for effect; it is
always good to let your audience have a chance to
work up its expectancy. At length, out of the silence
a noble Latin chant -- men's voices -- broke and
swelled up and rolled away into the night, a majestic
tide of melody. I had put that up, too, and it was one
of the best effects I ever invented. When it was finished
I stood up on the platform and extended my hands
abroad, for two minutes, with my face uplifted -- that
always produces a dead hush -- and then slowly pro-
nounced this ghastly word with a kind of awfulness which
caused hundreds to tremble, and many women to faint:

  "Constantinopolitanischerdudelsackspfeifen-
  machersgesellschafft!"

Just as I was moaning out the closing hunks of that
word, I touched off one of my electric connections
and all that murky world of people stood revealed in a
hideous blue glare! It was immense -- that effect!
Lots of people shrieked, women curled up and quit in
every direction, foundlings collapsed by platoons. The
abbot and the monks crossed themselves nimbly and
their lips fluttered with agitated prayers. Merlin held
his grip, but he was astonished clear down to his
corns; he had never seen anything to begin with that,
before. Now was the time to pile in the effects. I
lifted my hands and groaned out this word -- as it were
in agony:

  "Nihilistendynamittheaterkaestchensspreng-
  ungsattentaetsversuchungen!"

-- and turned on the red fire! You should have heard
that Atlantic of people moan and howl when that
crimson hell joined the blue! After sixty seconds I
shouted:

  "Transvaaltruppentropentransporttrampelthier-
  treibertrauungsthraenentragoedie!"

-- and lit up the green fire! After waiting only forty
seconds this time, I spread my arms abroad and
thundered out the devastating syllables of this word of
words:

  "Mekkamuselmannenmassenmenchenmoerdermohrenmutter-
  marmormonumentenmacher!"

-- and whirled on the purple glare! There they were,
all going at once, red, blue, green, purple! -- four
furious volcanoes pouring vast clouds of radiant smoke
aloft, and spreading a blinding rainbowed noonday to
the furthest confines of that valley. In the distance
one could see that fellow on the pillar standing rigid
against the background of sky, his seesaw stopped for
the first time in twenty years. I knew the boys were
at the pump now and ready. So I said to the abbot:

"The time is come, Father. I am about to pro-
nounce the dread name and command the spell to dis-
solve. You want to brace up, and take hold of some-
thing." Then I shouted to the people: "Behold, in
another minute the spell will be broken, or no mortal
can break it. If it break, all will know it, for you will
see the sacred water gush from the chapel door!"

I stood a few moments, to let the hearers have a
chance to spread my announcement to those who
couldn't hear, and so convey it to the furthest ranks,
then I made a grand exhibition of extra posturing and
gesturing, and shouted:

"Lo, I command the fell spirit that possesses the
holy fountain to now disgorge into the skies all the
infernal fires that still remain in him, and straightway
dissolve his spell and flee hence to the pit, there to lie
bound a thousand years. By his own dread name I
command it -- BGWJJILLIGKKK!"

Then I touched off the hogshead of rockets, and a
vast fountain of dazzling lances of fire vomited itself
toward the zenith with a hissing rush, and burst in
mid-sky into a storm of flashing jewels! One mighty
groan of terror started up from the massed people --
then suddenly broke into a wild hosannah of joy -- for
there, fair and plain in the uncanny glare, they saw
the freed water leaping forth! The old abbot could not
speak a word, for tears and the chokings in his throat;
without utterance of any sort, he folded me in his arms
and mashed me. It was more eloquent than speech.
And harder to get over, too, in a country where there
were really no doctors that were worth a damaged
nickel.

You should have seen those acres of people throw
themselves down in that water and kiss it; kiss it, and
pet it, and fondle it, and talk to it as if it were alive,
and welcome it back with the dear names they gave
their darlings, just as if it had been a friend who was
long gone away and lost, and was come home again.
Yes, it was pretty to see, and made me think more of
them than I had done before.

I sent Merlin home on a shutter. He had caved in
and gone down like a landslide when I pronounced that
fearful name, and had never come to since. He never
had heard that name before, -- neither had I -- but to
him it was the right one. Any jumble would have
been the right one. He admitted, afterward, that
that spirit's own mother could not have pronounced
that name better than I did. He never could under-
stand how I survived it, and I didn't tell him. It is
only young magicians that give away a secret like that.
Merlin spent three months working enchantments to
try to find out the deep trick of how to pronounce that
name and outlive it. But he didn't arrive.

When I started to the chapel, the populace un-
covered and fell back reverently to make a wide way
for me, as if I had been some kind of a superior being
-- and I was. I was aware of that. I took along a
night shift of monks, and taught them the mystery of
the pump, and set them to work, for it was plain that
a good part of the people out there were going to sit
up with the water all night, consequently it was but
right that they should have all they wanted of it. To
those monks that pump was a good deal of a miracle
itself, and they were full of wonder over it; and of
admiration, too, of the exceeding effectiveness of its
performance.

It was a great night, an immense night. There was
reputation in it. I could hardly get to sleep for glory-
ing over it.


CHAPTER XXIV.
A RIVAL MAGICIAN

MY influence in the Valley of Holiness was some-
thing prodigious now. It seemed worth while
to try to turn it to some valuable account. The
thought came to me the next morning, and was sug-
gested by my seeing one of my knights who was in
the soap line come riding in. According to history,
the monks of this place two centuries before had been
worldly minded enough to want to wash. It might be
that there was a leaven of this unrighteousness still re-
maining. So I sounded a Brother:

"Wouldn't you like a bath?"

He shuddered at the thought -- the thought of the
peril of it to the well -- but he said with feeling:

"One needs not to ask that of a poor body who has
not known that blessed refreshment sith that he was a
boy. Would God I might wash me! but it may not
be, fair sir, tempt me not; it is forbidden."

And then he sighed in such a sorrowful way that I
was resolved he should have at least one layer of his
real estate removed, if it sized up my whole influence
and bankrupted the pile. So I went to the abbot and
asked for a permit for this Brother. He blenched at
the idea -- I don't mean that you could see him blench,
for of course you couldn't see it without you scraped
him, and I didn't care enough about it to scrape him,
but I knew the blench was there, just the same, and
within a book-cover's thickness of the surface, too --
blenched, and trembled. He said:

"Ah, son, ask aught else thou wilt, and it is thine,
and freely granted out of a grateful heart -- but this,
oh, this! Would you drive away the blessed water
again?"

"No, Father, I will not drive it away. I have
mysterious knowledge which teaches me that there
was an error that other time when it was thought the
institution of the bath banished the fountain." A
large interest began to show up in the old man's face.
"My knowledge informs me that the bath was inno-
cent of that misfortune, which was caused by quite
another sort of sin."

"These are brave words -- but -- but right welcome,
if they be true."

"They are true, indeed. Let me build the bath
again, Father. Let me build it again, and the fountain
shall flow forever."

"You promise this? -- you promise it? Say the
word -- say you promise it!"

"I do promise it."

"Then will I have the first bath myself! Go --
get ye to your work. Tarry not, tarry not, but go."

I and my boys were at work, straight off. The
ruins of the old bath were there yet in the basement of
the monastery, not a stone missing. They had been
left just so, all these lifetimes, and avoided with a
pious fear, as things accursed. In two days we had it
all done and the water in -- a spacious pool of clear
pure water that a body could swim in. It was running
water, too. It came in, and went out, through the
ancient pipes. The old abbot kept his word, and was
the first to try it. He went down black and shaky,
leaving the whole black community above troubled and
worried and full of bodings; but he came back white
and joyful, and the game was made! another triumph
scored.

It was a good campaign that we made in that Valley
of Holiness, and I was very well satisfied, and ready to
move on now, but I struck a disappointment. I caught
a heavy cold, and it started up an old lurking rheuma-
tism of mine. Of course the rheumatism hunted up
my weakest place and located itself there. This was
the place where the abbot put his arms about me and
mashed me, what time he was moved to testify his
gratitude to me with an embrace.

When at last I got out, I was a shadow. But every-
body was full of attentions and kindnesses, and these
brought cheer back into my life, and were the right
medicine to help a convalescent swiftly up toward
health and strength again; so I gained fast.

Sandy was worn out with nursing; so I made up my
mind to turn out and go a cruise alone, leaving her at
the nunnery to rest up. My idea was to disguise myself
as a freeman of peasant degree and wander through
the country a week or two on foot. This would give
me a chance to eat and lodge with the lowliest and
poorest class of free citizens on equal terms. There
was no other way to inform myself perfectly of their
everyday life and the operation of the laws upon it. If
I went among them as a gentleman, there would be
restraints and conventionalities which would shut me
out from their private joys and troubles, and I should
get no further than the outside shell.

One morning I was out on a long walk to get up
muscle for my trip, and had climbed the ridge which
bordered the northern extremity of the valley, when I
came upon an artificial opening in the face of a low
precipice, and recognized it by its location as a hermit-
age which had often been pointed out to me from a
distance as the den of a hermit of high renown for dirt
and austerity. I knew he had lately been offered a
situation in the Great Sahara, where lions and sandflies
made the hermit-life peculiarly attractive and difficult,
and had gone to Africa to take possession, so I thought
I would look in and see how the atmosphere of this
den agreed with its reputation.

My surprise was great: the place was newly swept
and scoured. Then there was another surprise. Back
in the gloom of the cavern I heard the clink of a little
bell, and then this exclamation:

"Hello Central! Is this you, Camelot? -- Be-
hold, thou mayst glad thy heart an thou hast faith to
believe the wonderful when that it cometh in unex-
pected guise and maketh itself manifest in impossible
places -- here standeth in the flesh his mightiness The
Boss, and with thine own ears shall ye hear him
speak!"

Now what a radical reversal of things this was; what
a jumbling together of extravagant incongruities; what
a fantastic conjunction of opposites and irreconcilables
-- the home of the bogus miracle become the home of
a real one, the den of a mediaeval hermit turned into a
telephone office!

The telephone clerk stepped into the light, and I
recognized one of my young fellows. I said:

"How long has this office been established here,
Ulfius?"

"But since midnight, fair Sir Boss, an it please you.
We saw many lights in the valley, and so judged it
well to make a station, for that where so many lights
be needs must they indicate a town of goodly size."

"Quite right. It isn't a town in the customary
sense, but it's a good stand, anyway. Do you know
where you are?"

"Of that I have had no time to make inquiry; for
whenas my comradeship moved hence upon their
labors, leaving me in charge, I got me to needed rest,
purposing to inquire when I waked, and report the
place's name to Camelot for record."

"Well, this is the Valley of Holiness."

It didn't take; I mean, he didn't start at the name,
as I had supposed he would. He merely said:

"I will so report it."

"Why, the surrounding regions are filled with the
noise of late wonders that have happened here! You
didn't hear of them?"

"Ah, ye will remember we move by night, and
avoid speech with all. We learn naught but that we
get by the telephone from Camelot."

"Why THEY know all about this thing. Haven't
they told you anything about the great miracle of the
restoration of a holy fountain?"

"Oh, THAT? Indeed yes. But the name of THIS
valley doth woundily differ from the name of THAT one;
indeed to differ wider were not pos --"

"What was that name, then?"

"The Valley of Hellishness."

"THAT explains it. Confound a telephone, anyway.
It is the very demon for conveying similarities of sound
that are miracles of divergence from similarity of sense.
But no matter, you know the name of the place now.
Call up Camelot."

He did it, and had Clarence sent for. It was good
to hear my boy's voice again. It was like being home.
After some affectionate interchanges, and some account
of my late illness, I said:

"What is new?"

"The king and queen and many of the court do
start even in this hour, to go to your valley to pay
pious homage to the waters ye have restored, and
cleanse themselves of sin, and see the place where the
infernal spirit spouted true hell-flames to the clouds --
an ye listen sharply ye may hear me wink and hear me
likewise smile a smile, sith 'twas I that made selection
of those flames from out our stock and sent them by
your order."

"Does the king know the way to this place?"

"The king? -- no, nor to any other in his realms,
mayhap; but the lads that holp you with your miracle
will be his guide and lead the way, and appoint the
places for rests at noons and sleeps at night."

"This will bring them here -- when?"

"Mid-afternoon, or later, the third day."

"Anything else in the way of news?"

"The king hath begun the raising of the standing
army ye suggested to him; one regiment is complete
and officered."

"The mischief! I wanted a main hand in that my-
self. There is only one body of men in the kingdom
that are fitted to officer a regular army."

"Yes -- and now ye will marvel to know there's not
so much as one West Pointer in that regiment."

"What are you talking about? Are you in earnest?"

"It is truly as I have said."

"Why, this makes me uneasy. Who were chosen,
and what was the method? Competitive examination?"

"Indeed, I know naught of the method. I but
know this -- these officers be all of noble family, and
are born -- what is it you call it? -- chuckleheads."

"There's something wrong, Clarence. "

"Comfort yourself, then; for two candidates for a
lieutenancy do travel hence with the king -- young
nobles both -- and if you but wait where you are you
will hear them questioned."

"That is news to the purpose. I will get one West
Pointer in, anyway. Mount a man and send him to
that school with a message; let him kill horses, if
necessary, but he must be there before sunset to-night
and say -- "

"There is no need. I have laid a ground wire to
the school. Prithee let me connect you with it."

It sounded good! In this atmosphere of telephones
and lightning communication with distant regions, I
was breathing the breath of life again after long suffo-
cation. I realized, then, what a creepy, dull, inanimate
horror this land had been to me all these years, and
how I had been in such a stifled condition of mind as
to have grown used to it almost beyond the power to
notice it.

I gave my order to the superintendent of the Acad-
emy personally. I also asked him to bring me some
paper and a fountain pen and a box or so of safety
matches. I was getting tired of doing without these
conveniences. I could have them now, as I wasn't
going to wear armor any more at present, and there-
fore could get at my pockets.

When I got back to the monastery, I found a thing
of interest going on. The abbot and his monks were
assembled in the great hall, observing with childish
wonder and faith the performances of a new magician,
a fresh arrival. His dress was the extreme of the
fantastic; as showy and foolish as the sort of thing an
Indian medicine-man wears. He was mowing, and
mumbling, and gesticulating, and drawing mystical
figures in the air and on the floor, -- the regular thing,
you know. He was a celebrity from Asia -- so he
said, and that was enough. That sort of evidence was
as good as gold, and passed current everywhere.

How easy and cheap it was to be a great magician
on this fellow's terms. His specialty was to tell you
what any individual on the face of the globe was doing
at the moment; and what he had done at any time in
the past, and what he would do at any time in the
future. He asked if any would like to know what the
Emperor of the East was doing now? The sparkling
eyes and the delighted rubbing of hands made eloquent
answer -- this reverend crowd WOULD like to know what
that monarch was at, just as this moment. The fraud
went through some more mummery, and then made
grave announcement:

"The high and mighty Emperor of the East doth at
this moment put money in the palm of a holy begging
friar -- one, two, three pieces, and they be all of
silver."

A buzz of admiring exclamations broke out, all
around:

"It is marvelous!" "Wonderful!" "What study,
what labor, to have acquired a so amazing power as this!"

Would they like to know what the Supreme Lord of
Inde was doing? Yes. He told them what the
Supreme Lord of Inde was doing. Then he told
them what the Sultan of Egypt was at; also what the
King of the Remote Seas was about. And so on and
so on; and with each new marvel the astonishment at
his accuracy rose higher and higher. They thought
he must surely strike an uncertain place some time;
but no, he never had to hesitate, he always knew, and
always with unerring precision. I saw that if this thing
went on I should lose my supremacy, this fellow would
capture my following, I should be left out in the cold.
I must put a cog in his wheel, and do it right away,
too. I said:

"If I might ask, I should very greatly like to know
what a certain person is doing."

"Speak, and freely. I will tell you."

"It will be difficult -- perhaps impossible."

"My art knoweth not that word. The more difficult
it is, the more certainly will I reveal it to you."

You see, I was working up the interest. It was
getting pretty high, too; you could see that by the
craning necks all around, and the half-suspended
breathing. So now I climaxed it:

"If you make no mistake -- if you tell me truly
what I want to know -- I will give you two hundred
silver pennies."

"The fortune is mine! I will tell you what you
would know."

"Then tell me what I am doing with my right hand."

"Ah-h!" There was a general gasp of surprise.
It had not occurred to anybody in the crowd -- that
simple trick of inquiring about somebody who wasn't
ten thousand miles away. The magician was hit hard;
it was an emergency that had never happened in his
experience before, and it corked him; he didn't know
how to meet it. He looked stunned, confused; he
couldn't say a word. "Come," I said, "what are
you waiting for? Is it possible you can answer up,
right off, and tell what anybody on the other side of
the earth is doing, and yet can't tell what a person is
doing who isn't three yards from you? Persons behind
me know what I am doing with my right hand -- they
will indorse you if you tell correctly." He was still
dumb. "Very well, I'll tell you why you don't speak
up and tell; it is because you don't know. YOU a
magician! Good friends, this tramp is a mere fraud
and liar."

This distressed the monks and terrified them. They
were not used to hearing these awful beings called
names, and they did not know what might be the con-
sequence. There was a dead silence now; superstitious
bodings were in every mind. The magician began to
pull his wits together, and when he presently smiled an
easy, nonchalant smile, it spread a mighty relief
around; for it indicated that his mood was not destruc-
tive. He said:

"It hath struck me speechless, the frivolity of this
person's speech. Let all know, if perchance there be
any who know it not, that enchanters of my degree
deign not to concern themselves with the doings of any
but kings, princes, emperors, them that be born in the
purple and them only. Had ye asked me what Arthur
the great king is doing, it were another matter, and I
had told ye; but the doings of a subject interest me
not."

"Oh, I misunderstood you. I thought you said
'anybody,' and so I supposed 'anybody' included --
well, anybody; that is, everybody."

"It doth -- anybody that is of lofty birth; and the
better if he be royal."

"That, it meseemeth, might well be," said the abbot,
who saw his opportunity to smooth things and avert
disaster, "for it were not likely that so wonderful a
gift as this would be conferred for the revelation of the
concerns of lesser beings than such as be born near to
the summits of greatness. Our Arthur the king --"

"Would you know of him?" broke in the en-
chanter.

"Most gladly, yea, and gratefully."

Everybody was full of awe and interest again right
away, the incorrigible idiots. They watched the incan-
tations absorbingly, and looked at me with a "There,
now, what can you say to that?" air, when the
announcement came:

"The king is weary with the chase, and lieth in his
palace these two hours sleeping a dreamless sleep."

"God's benison upon him!" said the abbot, and
crossed himself; "may that sleep be to the refresh-
ment of his body and his soul."

"And so it might be, if he were sleeping," I said,
"but the king is not sleeping, the king rides."

Here was trouble again -- a conflict of authority.
Nobody knew which of us to believe; I still had some
reputation left. The magician's scorn was stirred, and
he said:

"Lo, I have seen many wonderful soothsayers and
prophets and magicians in my life days, but none be-
fore that could sit idle and see to the heart of things
with never an incantation to help."

"You have lived in the woods, and lost much by it.
I use incantations myself, as this good brotherhood are
aware -- but only on occasions of moment."

When it comes to sarcasming, I reckon I know how
to keep my end up. That jab made this fellow squirm.
The abbot inquired after the queen and the court, and
got this information:

"They be all on sleep, being overcome by fatigue,
like as to the king."

I said:

"That is merely another lie. Half of them are
about their amusements, the queen and the other half
are not sleeping, they ride. Now perhaps you can
spread yourself a little, and tell us where the king and
queen and all that are this moment riding with them
are going?"

"They sleep now, as I said; but on the morrow
they will ride, for they go a journey toward the sea."

"And where will they be the day after to-morrow at
vespers?"

"Far to the north of Camelot, and half their journey
will be done."

"That is another lie, by the space of a hundred and
fifty miles. Their journey will not be merely half
done, it will be all done, and they will be HERE, in this
valley."

THAT was a noble shot! It set the abbot and the
monks in a whirl of excitement, and it rocked the en-
chanter to his base. I followed the thing right up:

"If the king does not arrive, I will have myself
ridden on a rail: if he does I will ride you on a rail
instead."

Next day I went up to the telephone office and found
that the king had passed through two towns that were
on the line. I spotted his progress on the succeeding
day in the same way. I kept these matters to myself.
The third day's reports showed that if he kept up his
gait he would arrive by four in the afternoon. There
was still no sign anywhere of interest in his coming;
there seemed to be no preparations making to receive
him in state; a strange thing, truly. Only one thing
could explain this: that other magician had been cut-
ting under me, sure. This was true. I asked a friend
of mine, a monk, about it, and he said, yes, the
magician had tried some further enchantments and
found out that the court had concluded to make no
journey at all, but stay at home. Think of that!
Observe how much a reputation was worth in such a
country. These people had seen me do the very
showiest bit of magic in history, and the only one
within their memory that had a positive value, and yet
here they were, ready to take up with an adventurer
who could offer no evidence of his powers but his mere
unproven word.

However, it was not good politics to let the king
come without any fuss and feathers at all, so I went
down and drummed up a procession of pilgrims and
smoked out a batch of hermits and started them out at
two o'clock to meet him. And that was the sort of
state he arrived in. The abbot was helpless with rage
and humiliation when I brought him out on a balcony
and showed him the head of the state marching in and
never a monk on hand to offer him welcome, and no
stir of life or clang of joy-bell to glad his spirit. He
took one look and then flew to rouse out his forces.
The next minute the bells were dinning furiously, and
the various buildings were vomiting monks and nuns,
who went swarming in a rush toward the coming pro-
cession; and with them went that magician -- and he
was on a rail, too, by the abbot's order; and his
reputation was in the mud, and mine was in the sky
again. Yes, a man can keep his trademark current in
such a country, but he can't sit around and do it; he
has got to be on deck and attending to business right
along.


CHAPTER XXV.
A COMPETITIVE EXAMINATION

WHEN the king traveled for change of air, or made
a progress, or visited a distant noble whom he
wished to bankrupt with the cost of his keep, part of
the administration moved with him. It was a fashion
of the time. The Commission charged with the ex-
amination of candidates for posts in the army came
with the king to the Valley, whereas they could have
transacted their business just as well at home. And
although this expedition was strictly a holiday excur-
sion for the king, he kept some of his business func-
tions going just the same. He touched for the evil, as
usual; he held court in the gate at sunrise and tried
cases, for he was himself Chief Justice of the King's
Bench.

He shone very well in this latter office. He was a
wise and humane judge, and he clearly did his honest
best and fairest, -- according to his lights. That is a
large reservation. His lights -- I mean his rearing --
often colored his decisions. Whenever there was a
dispute between a noble or gentleman and a person of
lower degree, the king's leanings and sympathies were
for the former class always, whether he suspected it or
not. It was impossible that this should be otherwise.
The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's
moral perceptions are known and conceded, the world
over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a
band of slaveholders under another name. This has a
harsh sound, and yet should not be offensive to any --
even to the noble himself -- unless the fact itself be an
offense: for the statement simply formulates a fact.
The repulsive feature of slavery is the THING, not its
name. One needs but to hear an aristocrat speak of
the classes that are below him to recognize -- and in
but indifferently modified measure -- the very air and
tone of the actual slaveholder; and behind these are
the slaveholder's spirit, the slaveholder's blunted feel-
ing. They are the result of the same cause in both
cases: the possessor's old and inbred custom of re-
garding himself as a superior being. The king's judg-
ments wrought frequent injustices, but it was merely
the fault of his training, his natural and unalterable
sympathies. He was as unfitted for a judgeship as
would be the average mother for the position of milk-
distributor to starving children in famine-time; her
own children would fare a shade better than the rest.

One very curious case came before the king. A
young girl, an orphan, who had a considerable estate,
married a fine young fellow who had nothing. The
girl's property was within a seigniory held by the
Church. The bishop of the diocese, an arrogant scion
of the great nobility, claimed the girl's estate on the
ground that she had married privately, and thus had
cheated the Church out of one of its rights as lord of
the seigniory -- the one heretofore referred to as le droit
du seigneur. The penalty of refusal or avoidance was
confiscation. The girl's defense was, that the lordship
of the seigniory was vested in the bishop, and the par-
ticular right here involved was not transferable, but
must be exercised by the lord himself or stand vacated;
and that an older law, of the Church itself, strictly
barred the bishop from exercising it. It was a very
odd case, indeed.

It reminded me of something I had read in my
youth about the ingenious way in which the aldermen
of London raised the money that built the Mansion
House. A person who had not taken the Sacrament
according to the Anglican rite could not stand as a
candidate for sheriff of London. Thus Dissenters were
ineligible; they could not run if asked, they could not
serve if elected. The aldermen, who without any
question were Yankees in disguise, hit upon this neat
device: they passed a by-law imposing a fine of L400
upon any one who should refuse to be a candidate for
sheriff, and a fine of L600 upon any person who, after
being elected sheriff, refused to serve. Then they went
to work and elected a lot of Dissenters, one after
another, and kept it up until they had collected
L15,000 in fines; and there stands the stately Man-
sion House to this day, to keep the blushing citizen in
mind of a long past and lamented day when a band of
Yankees slipped into London and played games of the
sort that has given their race a unique and shady
reputation among all truly good and holy peoples that
be in the earth.

The girl's case seemed strong to me; the bishop's
case was just as strong. I did not see how the king
was going to get out of this hole. But he got out. I
append his decision:

"Truly I find small difficulty here, the matter being
even a child's affair for simpleness. An the young
bride had conveyed notice, as in duty bound, to her
feudal lord and proper master and protector the bishop,
she had suffered no loss, for the said bishop could have
got a dispensation making him, for temporary con-
veniency, eligible to the exercise of his said right, and
thus would she have kept all she had. Whereas, fail-
ing in her first duty, she hath by that failure failed in
all; for whoso, clinging to a rope, severeth it above
his hands, must fall; it being no defense to claim that
the rest of the rope is sound, neither any deliverance
from his peril, as he shall find. Pardy, the woman's
case is rotten at the source. It is the decree of the
court that she forfeit to the said lord bishop all her
goods, even to the last farthing that she doth possess,
and be thereto mulcted in the costs. Next!"

Here was a tragic end to a beautiful honeymoon not
yet three months old. Poor young creatures! They
had lived these three months lapped to the lips in
worldly comforts. These clothes and trinkets they
were wearing were as fine and dainty as the shrewdest
stretch of the sumptuary laws allowed to people of
their degree; and in these pretty clothes, she crying
on his shoulder, and he trying to comfort her with
hopeful words set to the music of despair, they went
from the judgment seat out into the world homeless,
bedless, breadless; why, the very beggars by the road-
sides were not so poor as they.

Well, the king was out of the hole; and on terms
satisfactory to the Church and the rest of the aristoc-
racy, no doubt. Men write many fine and plausible
arguments in support of monarchy, but the fact re-
mains that where every man in a State has a vote,
brutal laws are impossible. Arthur's people were of
course poor material for a republic, because they had
been debased so long by monarchy; and yet even they
would have been intelligent enough to make short work
of that law which the king had just been administering
if it had been submitted to their full and free vote.
There is a phrase which has grown so common in the
world's mouth that it has come to seem to have sense
and meaning -- the sense and meaning implied when it
is used; that is the phrase which refers to this or that
or the other nation as possibly being "capable of self-
government"; and the implied sense of it is, that there
has been a nation somewhere, some time or other
which WASN'T capable of it -- wasn't as able to govern
itself as some self-appointed specialists were or would
be to govern it. The master minds of all nations, in
all ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the
mass of the nation, and from the mass of the nation
only -- not from its privileged classes; and so, no
matter what the nation's intellectual grade was; whether
high or low, the bulk of its ability was in the long
ranks of its nameless and its poor, and so it never saw
the day that it had not the material in abundance
whereby to govern itself. Which is to assert an always
self-proven fact: that even the best governed and most
free and most enlightened monarchy is still behind the
best condition attainable by its people; and that the
same is true of kindred governments of lower grades,
all the way down to the lowest.

King Arthur had hurried up the army business
altogether beyond my calculations. I had not sup-
posed he would move in the matter while I was away;
and so I had not mapped out a scheme for determining
the merits of officers; I had only remarked that it
would be wise to submit every candidate to a sharp
and searching examination; and privately I meant to
put together a list of military qualifications that no-
body could answer to but my West Pointers. That
ought to have been attended to before I left; for the
king was so taken with the idea of a standing army
that he couldn't wait but must get about it at once,
and get up as good a scheme of examination as he
could invent out of his own head.

I was impatient to see what this was; and to show,
too, how much more admirable was the one which I
should display to the Examining Board. I intimated
this, gently, to the king, and it fired his curiosity
When the Board was assembled, I followed him in;
and behind us came the candidates. One of these
candidates was a bright young West Pointer of mine,
and with him were a couple of my West Point pro-
fessors.

When I saw the Board, I did not know whether to
cry or to laugh. The head of it was the officer known
to later centuries as Norroy King-at-Arms! The two
other members were chiefs of bureaus in his depart-
ment; and all three were priests, of course; all officials
who had to know how to read and write were priests.

My candidate was called first, out of courtesy to
me, and the head of the Board opened on him with
official solemnity:

"Name?"

"Mal-ease."

"Son of?"

"Webster."

"Webster -- Webster. H'm -- I -- my memory
faileth to recall the name. Condition?"

"Weaver."

"Weaver! -- God keep us!"

The king was staggered, from his summit to his
foundations; one clerk fainted, and the others came
near it. The chairman pulled himself together, and
said indignantly:

"It is sufficient. Get you hence."

But I appealed to the king. I begged that my can-
didate might be examined. The king was willing, but
the Board, who were all well-born folk, implored the
king to spare them the indignity of examining the
weaver's son. I knew they didn't know enough to
examine him anyway, so I joined my prayers to theirs
and the king turned the duty over to my professors.
I had had a blackboard prepared, and it was put up
now, and the circus began. It was beautiful to hear
the lad lay out the science of war, and wallow in de-
tails of battle and siege, of supply, transportation,
mining and countermining, grand tactics, big strategy
and little strategy, signal service, infantry, cavalry,
artillery, and all about siege guns, field guns, gatling
guns, rifled guns, smooth bores, musket practice,
revolver practice -- and not a solitary word of it all
could these catfish make head or tail of, you under-
stand -- and it was handsome to see him chalk off
mathematical nightmares on the blackboard that would
stump the angels themselves, and do it like nothing,
too -- all about eclipses, and comets, and solstices, and
constellations, and mean time, and sidereal time, and
dinner time, and bedtime, and every other imaginable
thing above the clouds or under them that you could
harry or bullyrag an enemy with and make him wish
he hadn't come -- and when the boy made his military
salute and stood aside at last, I was proud enough to
hug him, and all those other people were so dazed they
looked partly petrified, partly drunk, and wholly caught
out and snowed under. I judged that the cake was ours,
and by a large majority.

Education is a great thing. This was the same
youth who had come to West Point so ignorant that
when I asked him, "If a general officer should have a
horse shot under him on the field of battle, what ought
he to do?" answered up naively and said:

"Get up and brush himself."

One of the young nobles was called up now. I
thought I would question him a little myself. I said:

"Can your lordship read?"

His face flushed indignantly, and he fired this at me:

"Takest me for a clerk? I trow I am not of a blood
that --"

"Answer the question!"

He crowded his wrath down and made out to answer
"No."

"Can you write?"

He wanted to resent this, too, but I said:

"You will confine yourself to the questions, and
make no comments. You are not here to air your
blood or your graces, and nothing of the sort will be
permitted. Can you write?"

"No."

"Do you know the multiplication table?"

"I wit not what ye refer to."

"How much is 9 times 6?"

"It is a mystery that is hidden from me by reason
that the emergency requiring the fathoming of it hath
not in my life-days occurred, and so, not having no
need to know this thing, I abide barren of the knowl-
edge."

"If A trade a barrel of onions to B, worth 2 pence
the bushel, in exchange for a sheep worth 4 pence and
a dog worth a penny, and C kill the dog before de-
livery, because bitten by the same, who mistook him
for D, what sum is still due to A from B, and which
party pays for the dog, C or D, and who gets the
money? If A, is the penny sufficient, or may he claim
consequential damages in the form of additional money
to represent the possible profit which might have
inured from the dog, and classifiable as earned incre-
ment, that is to say, usufruct?"

"Verily, in the all-wise and unknowable providence of
God, who moveth in mysterious ways his wonders to
perform, have I never heard the fellow to this question
for confusion of the mind and congestion of the ducts
of thought. Wherefore I beseech you let the dog and
the onions and these people of the strange and godless
names work out their several salvations from their
piteous and wonderful difficulties without help of mine,
for indeed their trouble is sufficient as it is, whereas an
I tried to help I should but damage their cause the
more and yet mayhap not live myself to see the deso-
lation wrought."

"What do you know of the laws of attraction and
gravitation?"

"If there be such, mayhap his grace the king did pro-
mulgate them whilst that I lay sick about the beginning
of the year and thereby failed to hear his proclamation."

"What do you know of the science of optics?"

"I know of governors of places, and seneschals of
castles, and sheriffs of counties, and many like small
offices and titles of honor, but him you call the Science
of Optics I have not heard of before; peradventure it
is a new dignity."

"Yes, in this country."

Try to conceive of this mollusk gravely applying for
an official position, of any kind under the sun! Why,
he had all the earmarks of a typewriter copyist, if you
leave out the disposition to contribute uninvited emen-
dations of your grammar and punctuation. It was
unaccountable that he didn't attempt a little help of
that sort out of his majestic supply of incapacity for
the job. But that didn't prove that he hadn't material
in him for the disposition, it only proved that he
wasn't a typewriter copyist yet. After nagging him a
little more, I let the professors loose on him and they
turned him inside out, on the line of scientific war, and
found him empty, of course. He knew somewhat
about the warfare of the time -- bushwhacking around
for ogres, and bull-fights in the tournament ring, and
such things -- but otherwise he was empty and useless.
Then we took the other young noble in hand, and he
was the first one's twin, for ignorance and incapacity.
I delivered them into the hands of the chairman of the
Board with the comfortable consciousness that their
cake was dough. They were examined in the previous
order of precedence.

"Name, so please you?"

"Pertipole, son of Sir Pertipole, Baron of Barley
Mash."

"Grandfather?"

"Also Sir Pertipole, Baron of Barley Mash."

"Great-grandfather?"

"The same name and title."

"Great-great-grandfather?"

"We had none, worshipful sir, the line failing be-
fore it had reached so far back."

"It mattereth not. It is a good four generations,
and fulfilleth the requirements of the rule."

"Fulfills what rule?" I asked.

"The rule requiring four generations of nobility or
else the candidate is not eligible."

"A man not eligible for a lieutenancy in the
army unless he can prove four generations of noble
descent?"

"Even so; neither lieutenant nor any other officer
may be commissioned without that qualification."

"Oh, come, this is an astonishing thing. What
good is such a qualification as that?"

"What good? It is a hardy question, fair sir and
Boss, since it doth go far to impugn the wisdom of
even our holy Mother Church herself."

"As how?"

"For that she hath established the self-same rule
regarding saints. By her law none may be canonized
until he hath lain dead four generations."

"I see, I see -- it is the same thing. It is wonder-
ful. In the one case a man lies dead-alive four genera-
tions -- mummified in ignorance and sloth -- and that
qualifies him to command live people, and take their
weal and woe into his impotent hands; and in the
other case, a man lies bedded with death and worms
four generations, and that qualifies him for office in the
celestial camp. Does the king's grace approve of this
strange law?"

The king said:

"Why, truly I see naught about it that is strange.
All places of honor and of profit do belong, by natural
right, to them that be of noble blood, and so these
dignities in the army are their property and would be
so without this or any rule. The rule is but to mark a
limit. Its purpose is to keep out too recent blood,
which would bring into contempt these offices, and
men of lofty lineage would turn their backs and scorn
to take them. I were to blame an I permitted this
calamity. YOU can permit it an you are minded so to
do, for you have the delegated authority, but that the
king should do it were a most strange madness and not
comprehensible to any."

"I yield. Proceed, sir Chief of the Herald's Col-
lege. "

The chairman resumed as follows:

"By what illustrious achievement for the honor of
the Throne and State did the founder of your great
line lift himself to the sacred dignity of the British
nobility?"

"He built a brewery."

"Sire, the Board finds this candidate perfect in all
the requirements and qualifications for military com-
mand, and doth hold his case open for decision after
due examination of his competitor."

The competitor came forward and proved exactly
four generations of nobility himself. So there was a
tie in military qualifications that far.

He stood aside a moment, and Sir Pertipole was
questioned further:

"Of what condition was the wife of the founder of
your line?"

"She came of the highest landed gentry, yet she
was not noble; she was gracious and pure and chari-
table, of a blameless life and character, insomuch that
in these regards was she peer of the best lady in the
land."

"That will do. Stand down." He called up the
competing lordling again, and asked: "What was the
rank and condition of the great-grandmother who con-
ferred British nobility upon your great house?"

"She was a king's leman and did climb to that
splendid eminence by her own unholpen merit from
the sewer where she was born."

"Ah, this, indeed, is true nobility, this is the right
and perfect intermixture. The lieutenancy is yours,
fair lord. Hold it not in contempt; it is the humble
step which will lead to grandeurs more worthy of the
splendor of an origin like to thine."

I was down in the bottomless pit of humiliation. I
had promised myself an easy and zenith-scouring
triumph, and this was the outcome!

I was almost ashamed to look my poor disappointed
cadet in the face. I told him to go home and be
patient, this wasn't the end.

I had a private audience with the king, and made a
proposition. I said it was quite right to officer that
regiment with nobilities, and he couldn't have done a
wiser thing. It would also be a good idea to add five
hundred officers to it; in fact, add as many officers
as there were nobles and relatives of nobles in the
country, even if there should finally be five times as
many officers as privates in it; and thus make it the
crack regiment, the envied regiment, the King's Own
regiment, and entitled to fight on its own hook and in
its own way, and go whither it would and come when
it pleased, in time of war, and be utterly swell and
independent. This would make that regiment the
heart's desire of all the nobility, and they would all
be satisfied and happy. Then we would make up the
rest of the standing army out of commonplace materi-
als, and officer it with nobodies, as was proper --
nobodies selected on a basis of mere efficiency -- and
we would make this regiment toe the line, allow it no
aristocratic freedom from restraint, and force it to do
all the work and persistent hammering, to the end that
whenever the King's Own was tired and wanted to go
off for a change and rummage around amongst ogres
and have a good time, it could go without uneasiness,
knowing that matters were in safe hands behind it, and
business going to be continued at the old stand, same
as usual. The king was charmed with the idea.

When I noticed that, it gave me a valuable notion.
I thought I saw my way out of an old and stubborn
difficulty at last. You see, the royalties of the Pen-
dragon stock were a long-lived race and very fruitful.
Whenever a child was born to any of these -- and it
was pretty often -- there was wild joy in the nation's
mouth, and piteous sorrow in the nation's heart. The
joy was questionable, but the grief was honest. Be-
cause the event meant another call for a Royal Grant.
Long was the list of these royalties, and they were a
heavy and steadily increasing burden upon the treasury
and a menace to the crown. Yet Arthur could not
believe this latter fact, and he would not listen to any
of my various projects for substituting something in
the place of the royal grants. If I could have per-
suaded him to now and then provide a support for one
of these outlying scions from his own pocket, I could
have made a grand to-do over it, and it would have
had a good effect with the nation; but no, he wouldn't
hear of such a thing. He had something like a
religious passion for royal grant; he seemed to look
upon it as a sort of sacred swag, and one could not
irritate him in any way so quickly and so surely as by
an attack upon that venerable institution. If I ven-
tured to cautiously hint that there was not another
respectable family in England that would humble itself
to hold out the hat -- however, that is as far as I ever
got; he always cut me short there, and peremptorily,
too.

But I believed I saw my chance at last. I would
form this crack regiment out of officers alone -- not a
single private. Half of it should consist of nobles,
who should fill all the places up to Major-General, and
serve gratis and pay their own expenses; and they
would be glad to do this when they should learn that
the rest of the regiment would consist exclusively of
princes of the blood. These princes of the blood should
range in rank from Lieutenant-General up to Field
Marshal, and be gorgeously salaried and equipped and
fed by the state. Moreover -- and this was the master
stroke -- it should be decreed that these princely gran-
dees should be always addressed by a stunningly gaudy
and awe-compelling title (which I would presently in-
vent), and they and they only in all England should
be so addressed. Finally, all princes of the blood
should have free choice; join that regiment, get that
great title, and renounce the royal grant, or stay out
and receive a grant. Neatest touch of all: unborn but
imminent princes of the blood could be BORN into the
regiment, and start fair, with good wages and a per-
manent situation, upon due notice from the parents.

All the boys would join, I was sure of that; so, all
existing grants would be relinquished; that the newly
born would always join was equally certain. Within
sixty days that quaint and bizarre anomaly, the Royal
Grant, would cease to be a living fact, and take its
place among the curiosities of the past.


CHAPTER XXVI.
THE FIRST NEWSPAPER

WHEN I told the king I was going out disguised as
a petty freeman to scour the country and
familiarize myself with the humbler life of the people,
he was all afire with the novelty of the thing in a
minute, and was bound to take a chance in the adven-
ture himself -- nothing should stop him -- he would
drop everything and go along -- it was the prettiest
idea he had run across for many a day. He wanted
to glide out the back way and start at once; but I
showed him that that wouldn't answer. You see, he
was billed for the king's-evil -- to touch for it, I mean
-- and it wouldn't be right to disappoint the house
and it wouldn't make a delay worth considering, any-
way, it was only a one-night stand. And I thought
he ought to tell the queen he was going away. He
clouded up at that and looked sad. I was sorry I had
spoken, especially when he said mournfully:

"Thou forgettest that Launcelot is here; and where
Launcelot is, she noteth not the going forth of the
king, nor what day he returneth."

Of course, I changed the Subject. Yes, Guenever
was beautiful, it is true, but take her all around she
was pretty slack. I never meddled in these matters,
they weren't my affair, but I did hate to see the way
things were going on, and I don't mind saying that
much. Many's the time she had asked me, "Sir
Boss, hast seen Sir Launcelot about?" but if ever she
went fretting around for the king I didn't happen to be
around at the time.

There was a very good lay-out for the king's-evil
business -- very tidy and creditable. The king sat
under a canopy of state; about him were clustered a
large body of the clergy in full canonicals. Conspicu-
ous, both for location and personal outfit, stood
Marinel, a hermit of the quack-doctor species, to
introduce the sick. All abroad over the spacious
floor, and clear down to the doors, in a thick jumble,
lay or sat the scrofulous, under a strong light. It
was as good as a tableau; in fact, it had all the look
of being gotten up for that, though it wasn't. There
were eight hundred sick people present. The work
was slow; it lacked the interest of novelty for me,
because I had seen the ceremonies before; the thing
soon became tedious, but the proprieties required me
to stick it out. The doctor was there for the reason
that in all such crowds there were many people who
only imagined something was the matter with them,
and many who were consciously sound but wanted the
immortal honor of fleshly contact with a king, and yet
others who pretended to illness in order to get the
piece of coin that went with the touch. Up to this
time this coin had been a wee little gold piece worth
about a third of a dollar. When you consider how
much that amount of money would buy, in that age
and country, and how usual it was to be scrofulous,
when not dead, you would understand that the annual
king's-evil appropriation was just the River and Harbor
bill of that government for the grip it took on the
treasury and the chance it afforded for skinning the
surplus. So I had privately concluded to touch the
treasury itself for the king's-evil. I covered six-
sevenths of the appropriation into the treasury a week
before starting from Camelot on my adventures, and
ordered that the other seventh be inflated into five-
cent nickels and delivered into the hands of the head
clerk of the King's Evil Department; a nickel to take
the place of each gold coin, you see, and do its work
for it. It might strain the nickel some, but I judged it
could stand it. As a rule, I do not approve of water-
ing stock, but I considered it square enough in this
case, for it was just a gift, anyway. Of course, you
can water a gift as much as you want to; and I gener-
ally do. The old gold and silver coins of the country
were of ancient and unknown origin, as a rule, but
some of them were Roman; they were ill-shapen, and
seldom rounder than a moon that is a week past the
full; they were hammered, not minted, and they were
so worn with use that the devices upon them were as
illegible as blisters, and looked like them. I judged
that a sharp, bright new nickel, with a first-rate like-
ness of the king on one side of it and Guenever on the
other, and a blooming pious motto, would take the
tuck out of scrofula as handy as a nobler coin and
please the scrofulous fancy more; and I was right.
This batch was the first it was tried on, and it worked
to a charm. The saving in expense was a notable
economy. You will see that by these figures: We
touched a trifle over 700 of the 800 patients; at former
rates, this would have cost the government about
$240; at the new rate we pulled through for about
$35, thus saving upward of $200 at one swoop. To
appreciate the full magnitude of this stroke, consider
these other figures: the annual expenses of a national
government amount to the equivalent of a contribution
of three days' average wages of every individual of the
population, counting every individual as if he were a
man. If you take a nation of 60,000,000, where
average wages are $2 per day, three days' wages taken
from each individual will provide $360,000,000 and
pay the government's expenses. In my day, in my
own country, this money was collected from imposts,
and the citizen imagined that the foreign importer paid
it, and it made him comfortable to think so; whereas,
in fact, it was paid by the American people, and was
so equally and exactly distributed among them that
the annual cost to the 100-millionaire and the annual
cost to the sucking child of the day-laborer was pre-
cisely the same -- each paid $6. Nothing could be
equaler than that, I reckon. Well, Scotland and
Ireland were tributary to Arthur, and the united popu-
lations of the British Islands amounted to something
less than 1,OOO,OOO. A mechanic's average wage was
3 cents a day, when he paid his own keep. By this
rule the national government's expenses were $90,000
a year, or about $250 a day. Thus, by the substitu-
tion of nickels for gold on a king's-evil day, I not
only injured no one, dissatisfied no one, but pleased
all concerned and saved four-fifths of that day's
national expense into the bargain -- a saving which
would have been the equivalent of $800,000 in my
day in America. In making this substitution I had
drawn upon the wisdom of a very remote source -- the
wisdom of my boyhood -- for the true statesman does
not despise any wisdom, howsoever lowly may be its
origin: in my boyhood I had always saved my pennies
and contributed buttons to the foreign missionary
cause. The buttons would answer the ignorant savage
as well as the coin, the coin would answer me better
than the buttons; all hands were happy and nobody
hurt.

Marinel took the patients as they came. He ex-
amined the candidate; if he couldn't qualify he was
warned off; if he could he was passed along to the
king. A priest pronounced the words, "They shall
lay their hands on the sick, and they shall recover."
Then the king stroked the ulcers, while the reading
continued; finally, the patient graduated and got his
nickel -- the king hanging it around his neck himself --
and was dismissed. Would you think that that would
cure? It certainly did. Any mummery will cure if
the patient's faith is strong in it. Up by Astolat there
was a chapel where the Virgin had once appeared to a
girl who used to herd geese around there -- the girl
said so herself -- and they built the chapel upon that
spot and hung a picture in it representing the occur-
rence -- a picture which you would think it dangerous
for a sick person to approach; whereas, on the con-
trary, thousands of the lame and the sick came and
prayed before it every year and went away whole and
sound; and even the well could look upon it and live.
Of course, when I was told these things I did not be-
lieve them; but when I went there and saw them I had
to succumb. I saw the cures effected myself; and
they were real cures and not questionable. I saw
cripples whom I had seen around Camelot for years
on crutches, arrive and pray before that picture, and
put down their crutches and walk off without a limp.
There were piles of crutches there which had been left
by such people as a testimony.

In other places people operated on a patient's mind,
without saying a word to him, and cured him. In
others, experts assembled patients in a room and
prayed over them, and appealed to their faith, and
those patients went away cured. Wherever you find a
king who can't cure the king's-evil you can be sure
that the most valuable superstition that supports his
throne -- the subject's belief in the divine appointment
of his sovereign -- has passed away. In my youth the
monarchs of England had ceased to touch for the evil,
but there was no occasion for this diffidence: they
could have cured it forty-nine times in fifty.

Well, when the priest had been droning for three
hours, and the good king polishing the evidences, and
the sick were still pressing forward as plenty as ever, I
got to feeling intolerably bored. I was sitting by an
open window not far from the canopy of state. For
the five hundredth time a patient stood forward to have
his repulsivenesses stroked; again those words were
being droned out: "they shall lay their hands on the
sick" -- when outside there rang clear as a clarion a
note that enchanted my soul and tumbled thirteen
worthless centuries about my ears: "Camelot WEEKLY
HOSANNAH AND LITERARY VOLCANO! -- latest irruption --
only two cents -- all about the big miracle in the
Valley of Holiness!" One greater than kings had
arrived -- the newsboy. But I was the only person in
all that throng who knew the meaning of this mighty
birth, and what this imperial magician was come into
the world to do.

I dropped a nickel out of the window and got my
paper; the Adam-newsboy of the world went around
the corner to get my change; is around the corner
yet. It was delicious to see a newspaper again, yet I
was conscious of a secret shock when my eye fell upon
the first batch of display head-lines. I had lived in a
clammy atmosphere of reverence, respect, deference,
so long that they sent a quivery little cold wave
through me:

              HIGH TIMES IN THE VALLEY

                    OF HOLINESS!

                        ----

               THE WATER-WORKS CORKED!

                        ----

         BRER MERLIN WORKS HIS ARTS, BUT GETS
                        LEFT?

                        ----

      But the Boss scores on his first Innings!

                        ----

          The Miraculous Well Uncorked amid
                  awful outbursts of

              INFERNAL FIRE AND SMOKE
                     ATHUNDER!

                        ----

           THE BUZZARD-ROOST ASTONISHED!

                        ----

              UNPARALLELED REJOIBINGS!

-- and so on, and so on. Yes, it was too loud. Once
I could have enjoyed it and seen nothing out of the
way about it, but now its note was discordant. It was
good Arkansas journalism, but this was not Arkansas.
Moreover, the next to the last line was calculated to
give offense to the hermits, and perhaps lose us their
advertising. Indeed, there was too lightsome a tone
of flippancy all through the paper. It was plain I had
undergone a considerable change without noticing it.
I found myself unpleasantly affected by pert little
irreverencies which would have seemed but proper and
airy graces of speech at an earlier period of my life.
There was an abundance of the following breed of
items, and they discomforted me:

   LOCAL SMOKE AND CINDERS.

   Sir Launcelot met up with old King
   Agrivance of Ireland unexpectedly last
   weok over on the moor south of Sir
   Balmoral le Merveilleuse's hog dasture.
   The widow has been notified.

   Expedition No. 3 will start adout the
   first of mext month on a search f8r Sir
   Sagramour le Desirous. It is in com-
   and of the renowned Knight of the Red
   Lawns, assissted by Sir Persant of Inde,
   who is compete9t. intelligent, courte-
   ous, and in every way a brick, and fur-
   tHer assisted by Sir Palamides the Sara-
   cen, who is no huckleberry hinself.
   This is no pic-nic, these boys mean
   busine&s.

   The readers of the Hosannah will re-
   gret to learn that the hadndsome and
   popular Sir Charolais of Gaul, who dur-
   ing his four weeks' stay at the Bull and
   Halibut, this city, has won every heart
   by his polished manners and elegant
   cPnversation, will pUll out to-day for
   home. Give us another call, Charley!

   The bdsiness end of the funeral of
   the late Sir Dalliance the duke's son of
   Cornwall, killed in an encounter with
   the Giant of the Knotted Bludgeon last
   Tuesday on the borders of the Plain of
   Enchantment was in the hands of the
   ever affable and efficient Mumble,
   prince of un3ertakers, then whom there
   exists none by whom it were a more
   satisfying pleasure to have the last sad
   offices performed. Give him a trial.

   The cordial thanks of the Hosannah
   office are due, from editor down to
   devil, to the ever courteous and thought-
   ful Lord High Stew d of the Palace's
   Third Assistant V  t for several sau-
   ceTs of ice crEam a quality calculated
   to make the ey of the recipients hu-
   mid with grt  ude; and it done it.
   When this  administration wants to
   chalk up a desirable name for early
   promotion, the Hosannah would like a
   chance to sudgest.

   The Demoiselle Irene Dewlap, of
   South Astolat, is visiting her uncle, the
   popular host of the Cattlemen's Board-
   ing Ho&se, Liver Lane, this city.

   Young Barker the bellows-mender is
   hoMe again, and looks much improved
   by his vacation round-up among the ut-
   lying smithies. See his ad.

       A Yankee in King Arthur's Court     239

Of course it was good enough journalism for a be-
ginning; I knew that quite well, and yet it was some-
how disappointing. The "Court Circular" pleased
me better; indeed, its simple and dignified respect-
fulness was a distinct refreshment to me after all those
disgraceful familiarities. But even it could have been
improved. Do what one may, there is no getting an
air of variety into a court circular, I acknowledge that.
There is a profound monotonousness about its facts
that baffles and defeats one's sincerest efforts to make
them sparkle and enthuse. The best way to manage --
in fact, the only sensible way -- is to disguise repeti-
tiousness of fact under variety of form: skin your fact
each time and lay on a new cuticle of words. It de-
ceives the eye; you think it is a new fact; it gives you
the idea that the court is carrying on like everything;
this excites you, and you drain the whole column, with
a good appetite, and perhaps never notice that it's a
barrel of soup made out of a single bean. Clarence's
way was good, it was simple, it was dignified, it was
direct and business-like; all I say is, it was not the
best way:

             COURT CIRCULAR.

   On Monday, the king rode in the park.
   "  Tuesday,      "      "        "
   "  Wendesday     "      "        "
   "  Thursday      "      "        "
   "  Friday,       "      "        "
   "  Saturday      "      "        "
   "  Sunday,       "      "        "

However, take the paper by and large, I was vastly
pleased with it. Little crudities of a mechanical sort
were observable here and there, but there were not
enough of them to amount to anything, and it was
good enough Arkansas proof-reading, anyhow, and
better than was needed in Arthur's day and realm.
As a rule, the grammar was leaky and the construc-
tion more or less lame; but I did not much mind these
things. They are common defects of my own, and
one mustn't criticise other people on grounds where he
can't stand perpendicular himself.

I was hungry enough for literature to want to take
down the whole paper at this one meal, but I got only
a few bites, and then had to postpone, because the
monks around me besieged me so with eager ques-
tions: What is this curious thing? What is it for? Is
it a handkerchief? -- saddle blanket? -- part of a shirt?
What is it made of? How thin it is, and how dainty
and frail; and how it rattles. Will it wear, do you
think, and won't the rain injure it? Is it writing that
appears on it, or is it only ornamentation? They sus-
pected it was writing, because those among them who
knew how to read Latin and had a smattering of
Greek, recognized some of the letters, but they could
make nothing out of the result as a whole. I put my
information in the simplest form I could:

"It is a public journal; I will explain what that is,
another time. It is not cloth, it is made of paper;
some time I will explain what paper is. The lines on
it are reading matter; and not written by hand, but
printed; by and by I will explain what printing is. A
thousand of these sheets have been made, all exactly
like this, in every minute detail -- they can't be told
apart." Then they all broke out with exclamations of
surprise and admiration:

"A thousand! Verily a mighty work -- a year's
work for many men."

"No -- merely a day's work for a man and a boy."

They crossed themselves, and whiffed out a protec-
tive prayer or two.

"Ah-h -- a miracle, a wonder! Dark work of en-
chantment."

I let it go at that. Then I read in a low voice, to as
many as could crowd their shaven heads within hearing
distance, part of the account of the miracle of the
restoration of the well, and was accompanied by aston-
ished and reverent ejaculations all through: "Ah-h-h!"
"How true!" "Amazing, amazing!" "These be
the very haps as they happened, in marvelous exact-
ness!" And might they take this strange thing in
their hands, and feel of it and examine it? -- they
would be very careful. Yes. So they took it, hand-
ling it as cautiously and devoutly as if it had been
some holy thing come from some supernatural region;
and gently felt of its texture, caressed its pleasant
smooth surface with lingering touch, and scanned the
mysterious characters with fascinated eyes. These
grouped bent heads, these charmed faces, these speak-
ing eyes -- how beautiful to me! For was not this my
darling, and was not all this mute wonder and interest
and homage a most eloquent tribute and unforced
compliment to it? I knew, then, how a mother feels
when women, whether strangers or friends, take her
new baby, and close themselves about it with one
eager impulse, and bend their heads over it in a
tranced adoration that makes all the rest of the uni-
verse vanish out of their consciousness and be as if it
were not, for that time. I knew how she feels, and
that there is no other satisfied ambition, whether of
king, conqueror, or poet, that ever reaches half-way to
that serene far summit or yields half so divine a con-
tentment.

During all the rest of the seance my paper traveled
from group to group all up and down and about that
huge hall, and my happy eye was upon it always, and
I sat motionless, steeped in satisfaction, drunk with
enjoyment. Yes, this was heaven; I was tasting it
once, if I might never taste it more.


CHAPTER XXVII.
THE YANKEE AND THE KING TRAVEL INCOGNITO

ABOUT bedtime I took the king to my private
quarters to cut his hair and help him get the
hang of the lowly raiment he was to wear. The high
classes wore their hair banged across the forehead but
hanging to the shoulders the rest of the way around,
whereas the lowest ranks of commoners were banged
fore and aft both; the slaves were bangless, and
allowed their hair free growth. So I inverted a bowl
over his head and cut away all the locks that hung
below it. I also trimmed his whiskers and mustache
until they were only about a half-inch long; and tried
to do it inartistically, and succeeded. It was a villainous
disfigurement. When he got his lubberly sandals on,
and his long robe of coarse brown linen cloth, which
hung straight from his neck to his ankle-bones, he was
no longer the comeliest man in his kingdom, but one
of the unhandsomest and most commonplace and un-
attractive. We were dressed and barbered alike, and
could pass for small farmers, or farm bailiffs, or
shepherds, or carters; yes, or for village artisans, if
we chose, our costume being in effect universal among
the poor, because of its strength and cheapness. I
don't mean that it was really cheap to a very poor
person, but I do mean that it was the cheapest material
there was for male attire -- manufactured material, you
understand.

We slipped away an hour before dawn, and by broad
sun-up had made eight or ten miles, and were in the
midst of a sparsely settled country. I had a pretty
heavy knapsack; it was laden with provisions -- pro-
visions for the king to taper down on, till he could
take to the coarse fare of the country without damage.

I found a comfortable seat for the king by the road-
side, and then gave him a morsel or two to stay his
stomach with. Then I said I would find some water
for him, and strolled away. Part of my project was to
get out of sight and sit down and rest a little myself.
It had always been my custom to stand when in his
presence; even at the council board, except upon
those rare occasions when the sitting was a very long
one, extending over hours; then I had a trifling little
backless thing which was like a reversed culvert and
was as comfortable as the toothache. I didn't want to
break him in suddenly, but do it by degrees. We
should have to sit together now when in company, or
people would notice; but it would not be good politics
for me to be playing equality with him when there was
no necessity for it.

I found the water some three hundred yards away,
and had been resting about twenty minutes, when I
heard voices. That is all right, I thought -- peasants
going to work; nobody else likely to be stirring this
early. But the next moment these comers jingled into
sight around a turn of the road -- smartly clad people
of quality, with luggage-mules and servants in their
train! I was off like a shot, through the bushes, by
the shortest cut. For a while it did seem that these
people would pass the king before I could get to him;
but desperation gives you wings, you know, and I
canted my body forward, inflated my breast, and held
my breath and flew. I arrived. And in plenty good
enough time, too.

"Pardon, my king, but it's no time for ceremony --
jump! Jump to your feet -- some quality are coming!"

"Is that a marvel? Let them come."

"But my liege! You must not be seen sitting.
Rise! -- and stand in humble posture while they pass.
You are a peasant, you know."

"True -- I had forgot it, so lost was I in planning
of a huge war with Gaul" -- he was up by this time,
but a farm could have got up quicker, if there was
any kind of a boom in real estate -- "and right-so a
thought came randoming overthwart this majestic
dream the which --"

"A humbler attitude, my lord the king -- and
quick! Duck your head! -- more! -- still more! --
droop it!"

He did his honest best, but lord, it was no great
things. He looked as humble as the leaning tower at
Pisa. It is the most you could say of it. Indeed, it
was such a thundering poor success that it raised
wondering scowls all along the line, and a gorgeous
flunkey at the tail end of it raised his whip; but I
jumped in time and was under it when it fell; and
under cover of the volley of coarse laughter which fol-
lowed, I spoke up sharply and warned the king to take
no notice. He mastered himself for the moment, but
it was a sore tax; he wanted to eat up the procession.
I said:

"It would end our adventures at the very start;
and we, being without weapons, could do nothing with
that armed gang. If we are going to succeed in our
emprise, we must not only look the peasant but act
the peasant."

"It is wisdom; none can gainsay it. Let us go on,
Sir Boss. I will take note and learn, and do the best
I may."

He kept his word. He did the best he could, but
I've seen better. If you have ever seen an active,
heedless, enterprising child going diligently out of
one mischief and into another all day long, and an
anxious mother at its heels all the while, and just
saving it by a hair from drowning itself or breaking
its neck with each new experiment, you've seen the
king and me.

If I could have foreseen what the thing was going to
be like, I should have said, No, if anybody wants to
make his living exhibiting a king as a peasant, let him
take the layout; I can do better with a menagerie, and
last longer. And yet, during the first three days I
never allowed him to enter a hut or other dwelling. If
he could pass muster anywhere during his early
novitiate it would be in small inns and on the road;
so to these places we confined ourselves. Yes, he
certainly did the best he could, but what of that? He
didn't improve a bit that I could see.

He was always frightening me, always breaking out
with fresh astonishers, in new and unexpected places.
Toward evening on the second day, what does he do
but blandly fetch out a dirk from inside his robe!

"Great guns, my liege, where did you get that?"

"From a smuggler at the inn, yester eve."

"What in the world possessed you to buy it?"

"We have escaped divers dangers by wit -- thy wit
-- but I have bethought me that it were but prudence
if I bore a weapon, too. Thine might fail thee in
some pinch."

"But people of our condition are not allowed to
carry arms. What would a lord say -- yes, or any
other person of whatever condition -- if he caught an
upstart peasant with a dagger on his person?"

It was a lucky thing for us that nobody came along
just then. I persuaded him to throw the dirk away;
and it was as easy as persuading a child to give up
some bright fresh new way of killing itself. We walked
along, silent and thinking. Finally the king said:

"When ye know that I meditate a thing incon-
venient, or that hath a peril in it, why do you not
warn me to cease from that project?"

It was a startling question, and a puzzler. I didn't
quite know how to take hold of it, or what to say, and
so, of course, I ended by saying the natural thing:

"But, sire, how can I know what your thoughts
are?"

The king stopped dead in his tracks, and stared at
me.

"I believed thou wert greater than Merlin; and
truly in magic thou art. But prophecy is greater than
magic. Merlin is a prophet."

I saw I had made a blunder. I must get back my
lost ground. After a deep reflection and careful plan-
ning, I said:

"Sire, I have been misunderstood. I will explain.
There are two kinds of prophecy. One is the gift to
foretell things that are but a little way off, the other is
the gift to foretell things that are whole ages and
centuries away. Which is the mightier gift, do you
think?"

"Oh, the last, most surely!"

"True. Does Merlin possess it?"

"Partly, yes. He foretold mysteries about my birth
and future kingship that were twenty years away."

"Has he ever gone beyond that?"

"He would not claim more, I think."

"It is probably his limit. All prophets have their
limit. The limit of some of the great prophets has
been a hundred years."

"These are few, I ween."

"There have been two still greater ones, whose limit
was four hundred and six hundred years, and one
whose limit compassed even seven hundred and
twenty."

"Gramercy, it is marvelous!"

"But what are these in comparison with me? They
are nothing."

"What? Canst thou truly look beyond even so
vast a stretch of time as --"

"Seven hundred years? My liege, as clear as the
vision of an eagle does my prophetic eye penetrate and
lay bare the future of this world for nearly thirteen
centuries and a half!"

My land, you should have seen the king's eyes
spread slowly open, and lift the earth's entire atmos-
phere as much as an inch! That settled Brer Merlin.
One never had any occasion to prove his facts, with
these people; all he had to do was to state them. It
never occurred to anybody to doubt the statement.

"Now, then," I continued, "I COULD work both
kinds of prophecy -- the long and the short -- if I
chose to take the trouble to keep in practice; but I
seldom exercise any but the long kind, because the
other is beneath my dignity. It is properer to Merlin's
sort -- stump-tail prophets, as we call them in the pro-
fession. Of course, I whet up now and then and flirt
out a minor prophecy, but not often -- hardly ever, in
fact. You will remember that there was great talk,
when you reached the Valley of Holiness, about my
having prophesied your coming and the very hour of
your arrival, two or three days beforehand."

"Indeed, yes, I mind it now."

"Well, I could have done it as much as forty times
easier, and piled on a thousand times more detail into
the bargain, if it had been five hundred years away
instead of two or three days."

"How amazing that it should be so!"

"Yes, a genuine expert can always foretell a thing
that is five hundred years away easier than he can a
thing that's only five hundred seconds off."

"And yet in reason it should clearly be the other
way; it should be five hundred times as easy to fore-
tell the last as the first, for, indeed, it is so close by
that one uninspired might almost see it. In truth, the
law of prophecy doth contradict the likelihoods, most
strangely making the difficult easy, and the easy
difficult."

It was a wise head. A peasant's cap was no safe
disguise for it; you could know it for a king's under a
diving-bell, if you could hear it work its intellect.

I had a new trade now, and plenty of business in it.
The king was as hungry to find out everything that was
going to happen during the next thirteen centuries as
if he were expecting to live in them. From that time
out, I prophesied myself bald-headed trying to supply
the demand. I have done some indiscreet things in
my day, but this thing of playing myself for a prophet
was the worst. Still, it had its ameliorations. A
prophet doesn't have to have any brains. They are
good to have, of course, for the ordinary exigencies of
life, but they are no use in professional work. It is
the restfulest vocation there is. When the spirit of
prophecy comes upon you, you merely cake your
intellect and lay it off in a cool place for a rest, and
unship your jaw and leave it alone; it will work itself:
the result is prophecy.

Every day a knight-errant or so came along, and
the sight of them fired the king's martial spirit every
time. He would have forgotten himself, sure, and
said something to them in a style a suspicious shade
or so above his ostensible degree, and so I always got
him well out of the road in time. Then he would stand
and look with all his eyes; and a proud light would
flash from them, and his nostrils would inflate like a
war-horse's, and I knew he was longing for a brush
with them. But about noon of the third day I had
stopped in the road to take a precaution which had
been suggested by the whip-stroke that had fallen to
my share two days before; a precaution which I had
afterward decided to leave untaken, I was so loath to
institute it; but now I had just had a fresh reminder:
while striding heedlessly along, with jaw spread and
intellect at rest, for I was prophesying, I stubbed my
toe and fell sprawling. I was so pale I couldn't think
for a moment; then I got softly and carefully up and
unstrapped my knapsack. I had that dynamite bomb
in it, done up in wool in a box. It was a good thing
to have along; the time would come when I could do
a valuable miracle with it, maybe, but it was a nervous
thing to have about me, and I didn't like to ask the
king to carry it. Yet I must either throw it away or
think up some safe way to get along with its society.
I got it out and slipped it into my scrip, and just then
here came a couple of knights. The king stood,
stately as a statue, gazing toward them -- had for-
gotten himself again, of course -- and before I could
get a word of warning out, it was time for him to skip,
and well that he did it, too. He supposed they would
turn aside. Turn aside to avoid trampling peasant dirt
under foot? When had he ever turned aside himself --
or ever had the chance to do it, if a peasant saw him
or any other noble knight in time to judiciously save
him the trouble? The knights paid no attention to
the king at all; it was his place to look out himself,
and if he hadn't skipped he would have been placidly
ridden down, and laughed at besides.

The king was in a flaming fury, and launched out
his challenge and epithets with a most royal vigor.
The knights were some little distance by now. They
halted, greatly surprised, and turned in their saddles
and looked back, as if wondering if it might be worth
while to bother with such scum as we. Then they
wheeled and started for us. Not a moment must be
lost. I started for THEM. I passed them at a rattling
gait, and as I went by I flung out a hair-lifting soul-
scorching thirteen-jointed insult which made the king's
effort poor and cheap by comparison. I got it out of
the nineteenth century where they know how. They
had such headway that they were nearly to the king
before they could check up; then, frantic with rage,
they stood up their horses on their hind hoofs and
whirled them around, and the next moment here they
came, breast to breast. I was seventy yards off, then,
and scrambling up a great bowlder at the roadside.
When they were within thirty yards of me they let their
long lances droop to a level, depressed their mailed
heads, and so, with their horse-hair plumes streaming
straight out behind, most gallant to see, this lightning
express came tearing for me! When they were within
fifteen yards, I sent that bomb with a sure aim, and it
struck the ground just under the horses' noses.

Yes, it was a neat thing, very neat and pretty to
see. It resembled a steamboat explosion on the Mis-
sissippi; and during the next fifteen minutes we stood
under a steady drizzle of microscopic fragments of
knights and hardware and horse-flesh. I say we, for
the king joined the audience, of course, as soon as he
had got his breath again. There was a hole there
which would afford steady work for all the people in
that region for some years to come -- in trying to ex-
plain it, I mean; as for filling it up, that service would
be comparatively prompt, and would fall to the lot of
a select few -- peasants of that seignory; and they
wouldn't get anything for it, either.

But I explained it to the king myself. I said it was
done with a dynamite bomb, This information did
him no damage, because it left him as intelligent as he
was before. However, it was a noble miracle, in his
eyes, and was another settler for Merlin. I thought it
well enough to explain that this was a miracle of so
rare a sort that it couldn't be done except when the
atmospheric conditions were just right. Otherwise he
would be encoring it every time we had a good sub-
ject, and that would be inconvenient, because I hadn't
any more bombs along.


CHAPTER XXVIII.
DRILLING THE KING

ON the morning of the fourth day, when it was just
sunrise, and we had been tramping an hour in
the chill dawn, I came to a resolution: the king MUST
be drilled; things could not go on so, he must be
taken in hand and deliberately and conscientiously
drilled, or we couldn't ever venture to enter a dwelling;
the very cats would know this masquerader for a hum-
bug and no peasant. So I called a halt and said:

"Sire, as between clothes and countenance, you are
all right, there is no discrepancy; but as between your
clothes and your bearing, you are all wrong, there is a
most noticeable discrepancy. Your soldierly stride,
your lordly port -- these will not do. You stand too
straight, your looks are too high, too confident. The
cares of a kingdom do not stoop the shoulders, they do
not droop the chin, they do not depress the high level
of the eye-glance, they do not put doubt and fear in
the heart and hang out the signs of them in slouching
body and unsure step. It is the sordid cares of the
lowly born that do these things. You must learn the
trick; you must imitate the trademarks of poverty,
misery, oppression, insult, and the other several and
common inhumanities that sap the manliness out of a
man and make him a loyal and proper and approved
subject and a satisfaction to his masters, or the very
infants will know you for better than your disguise,
and we shall go to pieces at the first hut we stop at.
Pray try to walk like this."

The king took careful note, and then tried an
imitation.

"Pretty fair -- pretty fair. Chin a little lower,
please -- there, very good. Eyes too high; pray don't
look at the horizon, look at the ground, ten steps in
front of you. Ah -- that is better, that is very good.
Wait, please; you betray too much vigor, too much
decision; you want more of a shamble. Look at me,
please -- this is what I mean......Now you are get-
ting it; that is the idea -- at least, it sort of approaches
it......Yes, that is pretty fair. BUT! There is a
great big something wanting, I don't quite know what
it is. Please walk thirty yards, so that I can get
a perspective on the thing......Now, then -- your
head's right, speed's right, shoulders right, eyes right,
chin right, gait, carriage, general style right -- every-
thing's right! And yet the fact remains, the aggre-
gate's wrong. The account don't balance. Do it
again, please......NOW I think I begin to see what it
is. Yes, I've struck it. You see, the genuine spirit-
lessness is wanting; that's what's the trouble. It's all
AMATUEUR -- mechanical details all right, almost to a
hair; everything about the delusion perfect, except
that it don't delude."

"What, then, must one do, to prevail?"

"Let me think......I can't seem to quite get at it.
In fact, there isn't anything that can right the matter
but practice. This is a good place for it: roots and
stony ground to break up your stately gait, a region
not liable to interruption, only one field and one hut in
sight, and they so far away that nobody could see us
from there. It will be well to move a little off the
road and put in the whole day drilling you, sire."

After the drill had gone on a little while, I said:

"Now, sire, imagine that we are at the door of the
hut yonder, and the family are before us. Proceed,
please -- accost the head of the house."

The king unconsciously straightened up like a monu-
ment, and said, with frozen austerity:

"Varlet, bring a seat; and serve to me what cheer
ye have."

"Ah, your grace, that is not well done."

"In what lacketh it?"

"These people do not call EACH OTHER varlets."

"Nay, is that true?"

"Yes; only those above them call them so."

"Then must I try again. I will call him villein."

"No-no; for he may be a freeman."

"Ah -- so. Then peradventure I should call him
goodman."

"That would answer, your grace, but it would be
still better if you said friend, or brother."

"Brother! -- to dirt like that?"

"Ah, but WE are pretending to be dirt like that,
too."

"It is even true. I will say it. Brother, bring a
seat, and thereto what cheer ye have, withal. Now
'tis right."

"Not quite, not wholly right. You have asked for
one, not US -- for one, not both; food for one, a seat
for one."

The king looked puzzled -- he wasn't a very heavy
weight, intellectually. His head was an hour-glass; it
could stow an idea, but it had to do it a grain at a
time, not the whole idea at once.

"Would YOU have a seat also -- and sit?"

"If I did not sit, the man would perceive that we
were only pretending to be equals -- and playing the
deception pretty poorly, too."

"It is well and truly said! How wonderful is truth,
come it in whatsoever unexpected form it may! Yes,
he must bring out seats and food for both, and in
serving us present not ewer and napkin with more
show of respect to the one than to the other."

"And there is even yet a detail that needs correct-
ing. He must bring nothing outside; we will go in --
in among the dirt, and possibly other repulsive things,
-- and take the food with the household, and after the
fashion of the house, and all on equal terms, except the
man be of the serf class; and finally, there will be no
ewer and no napkin, whether he be serf or free. Please
walk again, my liege. There -- it is better -- it is the
best yet; but not perfect. The shoulders have known
no ignobler burden than iron mail, and they will not
stoop."

"Give me, then, the bag. I will learn the spirit
that goeth with burdens that have not honor. It is
the spirit that stoopeth the shoulders, I ween, and not
the weight; for armor is heavy, yet it is a proud
burden, and a man standeth straight in it......Nay,
but me no buts, offer me no objections. I will have
the thing. Strap it upon my back."

He was complete now with that knapsack on, and
looked as little like a king as any man I had ever seen.
But it was an obstinate pair of shoulders; they could
not seem to learn the trick of stooping with any sort of
deceptive naturalness. The drill went on, I prompting
and correcting:

"Now, make believe you are in debt, and eaten up
by relentless creditors; you are out of work -- which
is horse-shoeing, let us say -- and can get none; and
your wife is sick, your children are crying because
they are hungry --"

And so on, and so on. I drilled him as represent-
ing in turn all sorts of people out of luck and suffering
dire privations and misfortunes. But lord, it was only
just words, words -- they meant nothing in the world
to him, I might just as well have whistled. Words
realize nothing, vivify nothing to you, unless you have
suffered in your own person the thing which the words
try to describe. There are wise people who talk ever
so knowingly and complacently about "the working
classes," and satisfy themselves that a day's hard in-
tellectual work is very much harder than a day's hard
manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much bigger
pay. Why, they really think that, you know, because
they know all about the one, but haven't tried the
other. But I know all about both; and so far as I am
concerned, there isn't money enough in the universe
to hire me to swing a pickaxe thirty days, but I will do
the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as near
nothing as you can cipher it down -- and I will be
satisfied, too.

Intellectual "work" is misnamed; it is a pleasure,
a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The
poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author,
sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor,
preacher, singer is constructively in heaven when he is
at work; and as for the musician with the fiddle-bow
in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra
with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound
washing over him -- why, certainly, he is at work, if
you wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just
the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair
-- but there it is, and nothing can change it: the
higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it,
the higher shall be his pay in cash, also. And it's
also the very law of those transparent swindles, trans-
missible nobility and kingship.


CHAPTER XXIX.
THE SMALLPOX HUT

WHEN we arrived at that hut at mid-afternoon, we
saw no signs of life about it. The field near by
had been denuded of its crop some time before, and
had a skinned look, so exhaustively had it been har-
vested and gleaned. Fences, sheds, everything had a
ruined look, and were eloquent of poverty. No animal
was around anywhere, no living thing in sight. The
stillness was awful, it was like the stillness of death.
The cabin was a one-story one, whose thatch was
black with age, and ragged from lack of repair.

The door stood a trifle ajar. We approached it
stealthily -- on tiptoe and at half-breath -- for that is
the way one's feeling makes him do, at such a time.
The king knocked. We waited. No answer. Knocked
again. No answer. I pushed the door softly open
and looked in. I made out some dim forms, and a
woman started up from the ground and stared at me,
as one does who is wakened from sleep. Presently
she found her voice:

"Have mercy!" she pleaded. "All is taken,
nothing is left."

"I have not come to take anything, poor woman."

"You are not a priest?"

"No."

"Nor come not from the lord of the manor?"

"No, I am a stranger."

"Oh, then, for the fear of God, who visits with
misery and death such as be harmless, tarry not here,
but fly! This place is under his curse -- and his
Church's."

"Let me come in and help you -- you are sick and
in trouble."

I was better used to the dim light now. I could see
her hollow eyes fixed upon me. I could see how
emaciated she was.

"I tell you the place is under the Church's ban.
Save yourself -- and go, before some straggler see thee
here, and report it."

"Give yourself no trouble about me; I don't care
anything for the Church's curse. Let me help you."

"Now all good spirits -- if there be any such --
bless thee for that word. Would God I had a sup of
water! -- but hold, hold, forget I said it, and fly; for
there is that here that even he that feareth not the
Church must fear: this disease whereof we die. Leave
us, thou brave, good stranger, and take with thee such
whole and sincere blessing as them that be accursed
can give."

But before this I had picked up a wooden bowl and
was rushing past the king on my way to the brook.
It was ten yards away. When I got back and entered,
the king was within, and was opening the shutter that
closed the window-hole, to let in air and light. The
place was full of a foul stench. I put the bowl to the
woman's lips, and as she gripped it with her eager
talons the shutter came open and a strong light flooded
her face. Smallpox!

I sprang to the king, and said in his ear:

"Out of the door on the instant, sire! the woman
is dying of that disease that wasted the skirts of
Camelot two years ago."

He did not budge.

"Of a truth I shall remain -- and likewise help."

I whispered again:

"King, it must not be. You must go."

"Ye mean well, and ye speak not unwisely. But it
were shame that a king should know fear, and shame
that belted knight should withhold his hand where be
such as need succor. Peace, I will not go. It is you
who must go. The Church's ban is not upon me, but
it forbiddeth you to be here, and she will deal with
you with a heavy hand an word come to her of your
trespass."

It was a desperate place for him to be in, and might
cost him his life, but it was no use to argue with him.
If he considered his knightly honor at stake here, that
was the end of argument; he would stay, and nothing
could prevent it; I was aware of that. And so I
dropped the subject. The woman spoke:

"Fair sir, of your kindness will ye climb the ladder
there, and bring me news of what ye find? Be not
afraid to report, for times can come when even a
mother's heart is past breaking -- being already broke."

"Abide," said the king, "and give the woman to
eat. I will go." And he put down the knapsack.

I turned to start, but the king had already started.
He halted, and looked down upon a man who lay in a
dim light, and had not noticed us thus far, or spoken.

"Is it your husband?" the king asked.

"Yes."

"Is he asleep?"

"God be thanked for that one charity, yes -- these
three hours. Where shall I pay to the full, my grati-
tude! for my heart is bursting with it for that sleep he
sleepeth now."

I said:

"We will be careful. We will not wake him."

"Ah, no, that ye will not, for he is dead."

"Dead?"

"Yes, what triumph it is to know it! None can
harm him, none insult him more. He is in heaven
now, and happy; or if not there, he bides in hell and
is content; for in that place he will find neither abbot
nor yet bishop. We were boy and girl together; we
were man and wife these five and twenty years, and
never separated till this day. Think how long that is
to love and suffer together. This morning was he out
of his mind, and in his fancy we were boy and girl
again and wandering in the happy fields; and so in
that innocent glad converse wandered he far and
farther, still lightly gossiping, and entered into those
other fields we know not of, and was shut away from
mortal sight. And so there was no parting, for in his
fancy I went with him; he knew not but I went with
him, my hand in his -- my young soft hand, not this
withered claw. Ah, yes, to go, and know it not; to
separate and know it not; how could one go peace --
fuller than that? It was his reward for a cruel life
patiently borne."

There was a slight noise from the direction of the
dim corner where the ladder was. It was the king
descending. I could see that he was bearing some-
thing in one arm, and assisting himself with the other.
He came forward into the light; upon his breast lay a
slender girl of fifteen. She was but half conscious;
she was dying of smallpox. Here was heroism at its
last and loftiest possibility, its utmost summit; this
was challenging death in the open field unarmed, with
all the odds against the challenger, no reward set upon
the contest, and no admiring world in silks and cloth
of gold to gaze and applaud; and yet the king's bear-
ing was as serenely brave as it had always been in those
cheaper contests where knight meets knight in equal
fight and clothed in protecting steel. He was great
now; sublimely great. The rude statues of his ances-
tors in his palace should have an addition -- I would
see to that; and it would not be a mailed king killing
a giant or a dragon, like the rest, it would be a king
in commoner's garb bearing death in his arms that a
peasant mother might look her last upon her child and
be comforted.

He laid the girl down by her mother, who poured
out endearments and caresses from an overflowing
heart, and one could detect a flickering faint light of
response in the child's eyes, but that was all. The
mother hung over her, kissing her, petting her, and
imploring her to speak, but the lips only moved and
no sound came. I snatched my liquor flask from my
knapsack, but the woman forbade me, and said:

"No -- she does not suffer; it is better so. It
might bring her back to life. None that be so good
and kind as ye are would do her that cruel hurt. For
look you -- what is left to live for? Her brothers are
gone, her father is gone, her mother goeth, the
Church's curse is upon her, and none may shelter or
befriend her even though she lay perishing in the road.
She is desolate. I have not asked you, good heart, if
her sister be still on live, here overhead; I had no
need; ye had gone back, else, and not left the poor
thing forsaken --"

"She lieth at peace," interrupted the king, in a
subdued voice.

"I would not change it. How rich is this day in
happiness! Ah, my Annis, thou shalt join thy sister
soon -- thou'rt on thy way, and these be merciful
friends that will not hinder."

And so she fell to murmuring and cooing over the
girl again, and softly stroking her face and hair, and
kissing her and calling her by endearing names; but
there was scarcely sign of response now in the glazing
eyes. I saw tears well from the king's eyes, and
trickle down his face. The woman noticed them, too,
and said:

"Ah, I know that sign: thou'st a wife at home,
poor soul, and you and she have gone hungry to bed,
many's the time, that the little ones might have your
crust; you know what poverty is, and the daily insults
of your betters, and the heavy hand of the Church and
the king."

The king winced under this accidental home-shot,
but kept still; he was learning his part; and he was
playing it well, too, for a pretty dull beginner. I
struck up a diversion. I offered the woman food and
liquor, but she refused both. She would allow noth-
ing to come between her and the release of death.
Then I slipped away and brought the dead child from
aloft, and laid it by her. This broke her down again,
and there was another scene that was full of heart-
break. By and by I made another diversion, and
beguiled her to sketch her story.

"Ye know it well yourselves, having suffered it --
for truly none of our condition in Britain escape it.
It is the old, weary tale. We fought and struggled
and succeeded; meaning by success, that we lived and
did not die; more than that is not to be claimed. No
troubles came that we could not outlive, till this year
brought them; then came they all at once, as one
might say, and overwhelmed us. Years ago the lord
of the manor planted certain fruit trees on our farm;
in the best part of it, too -- a grievous wrong and
shame --"

"But it was his right," interrupted the king.

"None denieth that, indeed; an the law mean any-
thing, what is the lord's is his, and what is mine is his
also. Our farm was ours by lease, therefore 'twas
likewise his, to do with it as he would. Some little
time ago, three of those trees were found hewn down.
Our three grown sons ran frightened to report the
crime. Well, in his lordship's dungeon there they lie,
who saith there shall they lie and rot till they confess.
They have naught to confess, being innocent, where-
fore there will they remain until they die. Ye know
that right well, I ween. Think how this left us; a
man, a woman and two children, to gather a crop that
was planted by so much greater force, yes, and pro-
tect it night and day from pigeons and prowling
animals that be sacred and must not be hurt by any
of our sort. When my lord's crop was nearly ready
for the harvest, so also was ours; when his bell rang
to call us to his fields to harvest his crop for nothing,
he would not allow that I and my two girls should
count for our three captive sons, but for only two of
them; so, for the lacking one were we daily fined.
All this time our own crop was perishing through neg-
lect; and so both the priest and his lordship fined us
because their shares of it were suffering through
damage. In the end the fines ate up our crop -- and
they took it all; they took it all and made us harvest
it for them, without pay or food, and we starving.
Then the worst came when I, being out of my mind
with hunger and loss of my boys, and grief to see my
husband and my little maids in rags and misery and
despair, uttered a deep blasphemy -- oh! a thousand
of them! -- against the Church and the Church's ways.
It was ten days ago. I had fallen sick with this dis-
ease, and it was to the priest I said the words, for he
was come to chide me for lack of due humility under
the chastening hand of God. He carried my trespass
to his betters; I was stubborn; wherefore, presently
upon my head and upon all heads that were dear to
me, fell the curse of Rome.

"Since that day we are avoided, shunned with horror.
None has come near this hut to know whether we live
or not. The rest of us were taken down. Then I
roused me and got up, as wife and mother will. It
was little they could have eaten in any case; it was
less than little they had to eat. But there was water,
and I gave them that. How they craved it! and how
they blessed it! But the end came yesterday; my
strength broke down. Yesterday was the last time I
ever saw my husband and this youngest child alive. I
have lain here all these hours -- these ages, ye may
say -- listening, listening for any sound up there
that --"

She gave a sharp quick glance at her eldest daughter,
then cried out, "Oh, my darling!" and feebly gath-
ered the stiffening form to her sheltering arms. She
had recognized the death-rattle.