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Title: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Author: Mark Twain

Release date: July 7, 2004 [eBook #86]
Most recently updated: May 25, 2025

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/86

Credits: David Widger

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A
CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT ***

A C O N N E C T I C U T YA N K E E
I N K I N G A RT H U R ’ S
C O U RT

by MARK TWAIN

(Samuel L. Clemens)

CONTENTS:

CHAPTER I. CAMELOT
CHAPTER II. KING ARTHUR’S COURT
CHAPTER III. KNIGHTS OF THE TABLE ROUND
CHAPTER IV. SIR DINADAN THE HUMORIST
CHAPTER V. AN INSPIRATION
CHAPTER VI. THE ECLIPSE
CHAPTER VII. MERLIN’S TOWER
CHAPTER VIII. THE BOSS
CHAPTER IX. THE TOURNAMENT
CHAPTER X. BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION
CHAPTER XI. THE YANKEE IN SEARCH OF ADVENTURES
CHAPTER XII. SLOW TORTURE
CHAPTER XIII. FREEMEN!
CHAPTER XIV. “DEFEND THEE, LORD!
CHAPTER XV. SANDY’S TALE
CHAPTER XVI. MORGAN LE FAY
CHAPTER XVII. A ROYAL BANQUET
CHAPTER XVIII. IN THE QUEEN’S DUNGEONS
CHAPTER XIX. KNIGHT ERRANTRY AS A TRADE
CHAPTER XX. THE OGRE’S CASTLE
CHAPTER XXI. THE PILGRIMS
CHAPTER XXII. THE HOLY FOUNTAIN
CHAPTER XXIII. RESTORATION OF THE FOUNTAIN
CHAPTER XXIV. A RIVAL MAGICIAN
CHAPTER XXV. A COMPETITIVE EXAMINATION
CHAPTER XXVI. THE FIRST NEWSPAPER

CHAPTER XXVII. THE YANKEE AND THE KING TRAVEL
INCOGNITO
CHAPTER XXVIII. DRILLING THE KING
CHAPTER XXIX. THE SMALL-POX HUT
CHAPTER XXX. THE TRAGEDY OF THE MANOR-HOUSE
CHAPTER XXXI. MARCO
CHAPTER XXXII. DOWLEY’S HUMILIATION
CHAPTER XXXIII. SIXTH CENTURY POLITICAL ECONOMY
CHAPTER XXXIV. THE YANKEE AND THE KING SOLD AS SLAVES
CHAPTER XXXV. A PITIFUL INCIDENT
CHAPTER XXXVI. AN ENCOUNTER IN THE DARK
CHAPTER XXXVII. AN AWFUL PREDICAMENT
CHAPTER XXXVIII. SIR LAUNCELOT AND KNIGHTS TO THE
RESCUE
CHAPTER XXXIX. THE YANKEE’S FIGHT WITH THE KNIGHTS
CHAPTER XL. THREE YEARS LATER
CHAPTER XLI. THE INTERDICT
CHAPTER XLII. WAR!
CHAPTER XLIII. THE BATTLE OF THE SAND-BELT
CHAPTER XLIV. A POSTSCRIPT BY CLARENCE

PREFACE

The ungentle laws and customs touched upon in this tale are historical,
and the episodes which are used to illustrate them are also historical. It is
not pretended that these laws and customs existed in England in the sixth
century; no, it is only pretended that inasmuch as they existed in the English
and other civilizations of far later times, it is safe to consider that it is no
libel upon the sixth century to suppose them to have been in practice in that
day also. One is quite justified in inferring that whatever one of these laws
or customs was lacking in that remote time, its place was competently filled
by a worse one.
The question as to whether there is such a thing as divine right of kings is
not settled in this book. It was found too difficult. That the executive head
of a nation should be a person of lofty character and extraordinary ability,
was manifest and indisputable; that none but the Deity could select that
head unerringly, was also manifest and indisputable; that the Deity ought to
make that selection, then, was likewise manifest and indisputable;
consequently, that He does make it, as claimed, was an unavoidable
deduction. I mean, until the author of this book encountered the Pompadour,
and Lady Castlemaine, and some other executive heads of that kind; these
were found so difficult to work into the scheme, that it was judged better to
take the other tack in this book (which must be issued this fall), and then go
into training and settle the question in another book. It is, of course, a thing
which ought to be settled, and I am not going to have anything particular to
do next winter anyway.
MARK TWAIN
HARTFORD, July 21, 1889

A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S
COURT

A WORD OF EXPLANATION
It was in Warwick Castle that I came across the curious stranger whom I
am going to talk about. He attracted me by three things: his candid
simplicity, his marvelous familiarity with ancient armor, and the restfulness
of his company—for he did all the talking. We fell together, as modest
people will, in the tail of the herd that was being shown through, and he at
once began to say things which interested me. As he talked along, softly,
pleasantly, flowingly, he seemed to drift away imperceptibly out of this
world and time, and into some remote era and old forgotten country; and so
he gradually wove such a spell about me that I seemed to move among the
specters and shadows and dust and mold of a gray antiquity, holding speech
with a relic of it! Exactly as I would speak of my nearest personal friends or
enemies, or my most familiar neighbors, he spoke of Sir Bedivere, Sir Bors
de Ganis, Sir Launcelot of the Lake, Sir Galahad, and all the other great
names of the Table Round—and how old, old, unspeakably old and faded
and dry and musty and ancient he came to look as he went on! Presently he
turned to me and said, just as one might speak of the weather, or any other
common matter—
“You know about transmigration of souls; do you know about
transposition of epochs—and bodies?”
I said I had not heard of it. He was so little interested—just as when
people speak of the weather—that he did not notice whether I made him
any answer or not. There was half a moment of silence, immediately
interrupted by the droning voice of the salaried cicerone:

“Ancient hauberk, date of the sixth century, time of King Arthur and the
Round Table; said to have belonged to the knight Sir Sagramor le Desirous;
observe the round hole through the chain-mail in the left breast; can’t be
accounted for; supposed to have been done with a bullet since invention of
firearms—perhaps maliciously by Cromwell’s soldiers.”
My acquaintance smiled—not a modern smile, but one that must have
gone out of general use many, many centuries ago—and muttered
apparently to himself:
“Wit ye well, I saw it done.” Then, after a pause, added: “I did it myself.”
By the time I had recovered from the electric surprise of this remark, he
was gone.
All that evening I sat by my fire at the Warwick Arms, steeped in a dream
of the olden time, while the rain beat upon the windows, and the wind
roared about the eaves and corners. From time to time I dipped into old Sir
Thomas Malory’s enchanting book, and fed at its rich feast of prodigies and
adventures, breathed in the fragrance of its obsolete names, and dreamed
again. Midnight being come at length, I read another tale, for a nightcap—
this which here follows, to wit:

HOW SIR LAUNCELOT SLEW TWO GIANTS,
AND MADE A CASTLE FREE
Anon withal came there upon him two great giants, well
armed, all save the heads, with two horrible clubs in their
hands. Sir Launcelot put his shield afore him, and put the
stroke away of the one giant, and with his sword he clave his
head asunder. When his fellow saw that, he ran away as he
were wood [*demented], for fear of the horrible strokes, and
Sir Launcelot after him with all his might, and smote him on
the shoulder, and clave him to the middle. Then Sir
Launcelot went into the hall, and there came afore him three
score ladies and damsels, and all kneeled unto him, and
thanked God and him of their deliverance. For, sir, said they,
the most part of us have been here this seven year their

prisoners, and we have worked all manner of silk works for
our meat, and we are all great gentle-women born, and
blessed be the time, knight, that ever thou wert born; for
thou hast done the most worship that ever did knight in the
world, that will we bear record, and we all pray you to tell us
your name, that we may tell our friends who delivered us out
of prison. Fair damsels, he said, my name is Sir Launcelot
du Lake. And so he departed from them and betaught them
unto God. And then he mounted upon his horse, and rode
into many strange and wild countries, and through many
waters and valleys, and evil was he lodged. And at the last
by fortune him happened against a night to come to a fair
courtilage, and therein he found an old gentle-woman that
lodged him with a good-will, and there he had good cheer
for him and his horse. And when time was, his host brought
him into a fair garret over the gate to his bed. There Sir
Launcelot unarmed him, and set his harness by him, and
went to bed, and anon he fell on sleep. So, soon after there
came one on horseback, and knocked at the gate in great
haste. And when Sir Launcelot heard this he rose up, and
looked out at the window, and saw by the moonlight three
knights come riding after that one man, and all three lashed
on him at once with swords, and that one knight turned on
them knightly again and defended him. Truly, said Sir
Launcelot, yonder one knight shall I help, for it were shame
for me to see three knights on one, and if he be slain I am
partner of his death. And therewith he took his harness and
went out at a window by a sheet down to the four knights,
and then Sir Launcelot said on high, Turn you knights unto
me, and leave your fighting with that knight. And then they
all three left Sir Kay, and turned unto Sir Launcelot, and
there began great battle, for they alight all three, and strake
many strokes at Sir Launcelot, and assailed him on every
side. Then Sir Kay dressed him for to have holpen Sir
Launcelot. Nay, sir, said he, I will none of your help,
therefore as ye will have my help let me alone with them. Sir
Kay for the pleasure of the knight suffered him for to do his

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

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

THE STRANGER’S HISTORY

I am an American. I was born and reared in Hartford, in the State of
Connecticut—anyway, just over the river, in the country. So I am a Yankee
of the Yankees—and practical; yes, and nearly barren of sentiment, I
suppose—or poetry, in other words. My father was a blacksmith, my uncle
was a horse doctor, and I was both, along at first. Then I went over to the
great arms factory and learned my real trade; learned all there was to it;
learned to make everything: guns, revolvers, cannon, boilers, engines, all
sorts of labor-saving machinery. Why, I could make anything a body wanted
—anything in the world, it didn’t make any difference what; and if there
wasn’t any quick new-fangled way to make a thing, I could invent one—
and do it as easy as rolling off a log. I became head superintendent; had a
couple of thousand men under me.
Well, a man like that is a man that is full of fight—that goes without
saying. With a couple of thousand rough men under one, one has plenty of
that sort of amusement. I had, anyway. At last I met my match, and I got my
dose. It was during a misunderstanding conducted with crowbars with a
fellow we used to call Hercules. He laid me out with a crusher alongside the
head that made everything crack, and seemed to spring every joint in my
skull and made it overlap its neighbor. Then the world went out in darkness,
and I didn’t feel anything more, and didn’t know anything at all—at least
for a while.

When I came to again, I was sitting under an oak tree, on the grass, with
a whole beautiful and broad country landscape all to myself—nearly. Not
entirely; for there was a fellow on a horse, looking down at me—a fellow
fresh out of a picture-book. He was in old-time iron armor from head to
heel, with a helmet on his head the shape of a nail-keg with slits in it; and
he had a shield, and a sword, and a prodigious spear; and his horse had
armor on, too, and a steel horn projecting from his forehead, and gorgeous
red and green silk trappings that hung down all around him like a bedquilt,
nearly to the ground.
“Fair sir, will ye just?” said this fellow.
“Will I which?”
“Will ye try a passage of arms for land or lady or for—”
“What are you giving me?” I said. “Get along back to your circus, or I’ll
report you.”
Now what does this man do but fall back a couple of hundred yards and
then come rushing at me as hard as he could tear, with his nail-keg bent

down nearly to his horse’s neck and his long spear pointed straight ahead. I
saw he meant business, so I was up the tree when he arrived.
He allowed that I was his property, the captive of his spear. There was
argument on his side—and the bulk of the advantage—so I judged it best to
humor him. We fixed up an agreement whereby I was to go with him and he
was not to hurt me. I came down, and we started away, I walking by the
side of his horse. We marched comfortably along, through glades and over
brooks which I could not remember to have seen before—which puzzled
me and made me wonder—and yet we did not come to any circus or sign of
a circus. So I gave up the idea of a circus, and concluded he was from an
asylum. But we never came to an asylum—so I was up a stump, as you may
say. I asked him how far we were from Hartford. He said he had never
heard of the place; which I took to be a lie, but allowed it to go at that. At
the end of an hour we saw a far-away town sleeping in a valley by a
winding river; and beyond it on a hill, a vast gray fortress, with towers and
turrets, the first I had ever seen out of a picture.
“Bridgeport?” said I, pointing.
“Camelot,” said he.
My stranger had been showing signs of sleepiness. He caught himself
nodding, now, and smiled one of those pathetic, obsolete smiles of his, and
said:
“I find I can’t go on; but come with me, I’ve got it all written out, and
you can read it if you like.”
In his chamber, he said: “First, I kept a journal; then by and by, after
years, I took the journal and turned it into a book. How long ago that was!”
He handed me his manuscript, and pointed out the place where I should
begin:
“Begin here—I’ve already told you what goes before.” He was steeped in
drowsiness by this time. As I went out at his door I heard him murmur
sleepily: “Give you good den, fair sir.”
I sat down by my fire and examined my treasure. The first part of it—the
great bulk of it—was parchment, and yellow with age. I scanned a leaf
particularly and saw that it was a palimpsest. Under the old dim writing of
the Yankee historian appeared traces of a penmanship which was older and
dimmer still—Latin words and sentences: fragments from old monkish

legends, evidently. I turned to the place indicated by my stranger and began
to read—as follows.

THE TALE OF THE LOST LAND

CHAPTER I.
CAMELOT

“Camelot—Camelot,” said I to myself. “I don’t seem to remember
hearing of it before. Name of the asylum, likely.”
It was a soft, reposeful summer landscape, as lovely as a dream, and as
lonesome as Sunday. The air was full of the smell of flowers, and the
buzzing of insects, and the twittering of birds, and there were no people, no
wagons, there was no stir of life, nothing going on. The road was mainly a
winding path with hoof-prints in it, and now and then a faint trace of wheels
on either side in the grass—wheels that apparently had a tire as broad as
one’s hand.
Presently a fair slip of a girl, about ten years old, with a cataract of
golden hair streaming down over her shoulders, came along. Around her

head she wore a hoop of flame-red poppies. It was as sweet an outfit as ever
I saw, what there was of it. She walked indolently along, with a mind at
rest, its peace reflected in her innocent face. The circus man paid no
attention to her; didn’t even seem to see her. And she—she was no more
startled at his fantastic make-up than if she was used to his like every day of
her life. She was going by as indifferently as she might have gone by a
couple of cows; but when she happened to notice me, then there was a
change! Up went her hands, and she was turned to stone; her mouth
dropped open, her eyes stared wide and timorously, she was the picture of
astonished curiosity touched with fear. And there she stood gazing, in a sort
of stupefied fascination, till we turned a corner of the wood and were lost to
her view. That she should be startled at me instead of at the other man, was
too many for me; I couldn’t make head or tail of it. And that she should
seem to consider me a spectacle, and totally overlook her own merits in that
respect, was another puzzling thing, and a display of magnanimity, too, that
was surprising in one so young. There was food for thought here. I moved
along as one in a dream.
As we approached the town, signs of life began to appear. At intervals we
passed a wretched cabin, with a thatched roof, and about it small fields and
garden patches in an indifferent state of cultivation. There were people, too;
brawny men, with long, coarse, uncombed hair that hung down over their
faces and made them look like animals. They and the women, as a rule,
wore a coarse tow-linen robe that came well below the knee, and a rude sort
of sandal, and many wore an iron collar. The small boys and girls were
always naked; but nobody seemed to know it. All of these people stared at
me, talked about me, ran into the huts and fetched out their families to gape
at me; but nobody ever noticed that other fellow, except to make him
humble salutation and get no response for their pains.
In the town were some substantial windowless houses of stone scattered
among a wilderness of thatched cabins; the streets were mere crooked
alleys, and unpaved; troops of dogs and nude children played in the sun and
made life and noise; hogs roamed and rooted contentedly about, and one of
them lay in a reeking wallow in the middle of the main thoroughfare and
suckled her family. Presently there was a distant blare of military music; it
came nearer, still nearer, and soon a noble cavalcade wound into view,
glorious with plumed helmets and flashing mail and flaunting banners and
rich doublets and horse-cloths and gilded spearheads; and through the muck

and swine, and naked brats, and joyous dogs, and shabby huts, it took its
gallant way, and in its wake we followed.

Followed through one winding alley and then another,—and climbing,
always climbing—till at last we gained the breezy height where the huge
castle stood. There was an exchange of bugle blasts; then a parley from the
walls, where men-at-arms, in hauberk and morion, marched back and forth
with halberd at shoulder under flapping banners with the rude figure of a
dragon displayed upon them; and then the great gates were flung open, the
drawbridge was lowered, and the head of the cavalcade swept forward
under the frowning arches; and we, following, soon found ourselves in a
great paved court, with towers and turrets stretching up into the blue air on
all the four sides; and all about us the dismount was going on, and much
greeting and ceremony, and running to and fro, and a gay display of moving
and intermingling colors, and an altogether pleasant stir and noise and
confusion.

CHAPTER II.
KING ARTHUR’S COURT

The moment I got a chance I slipped aside privately and touched an
ancient common looking man on the shoulder and said, in an insinuating,
confidential way:
“Friend, do me a kindness. Do you belong to the asylum, or are you just
on a visit or something like that?”
He looked me over stupidly, and said:
“Marry, fair sir, me seemeth—”
“That will do,” I said; “I reckon you are a patient.”

I moved away, cogitating, and at the same time keeping an eye out for
any chance passenger in his right mind that might come along and give me
some light. I judged I had found one, presently; so I drew him aside and
said in his ear:
“If I could see the head keeper a minute—only just a minute—”
“Prithee do not let me.”
“Let you what?”
“Hinder me, then, if the word please thee better.” Then he went on to say
he was an under-cook and could not stop to gossip, though he would like it
another time; for it would comfort his very liver to know where I got my
clothes. As he started away he pointed and said yonder was one who was
idle enough for my purpose, and was seeking me besides, no doubt. This
was an airy slim boy in shrimp-colored tights that made him look like a
forked carrot, the rest of his gear was blue silk and dainty laces and ruffles;
and he had long yellow curls, and wore a plumed pink satin cap tilted
complacently over his ear. By his look, he was good-natured; by his gait, he
was satisfied with himself. He was pretty enough to frame. He arrived,
looked me over with a smiling and impudent curiosity; said he had come for
me, and informed me that he was a page.
“Go ’long,” I said; “you ain’t more than a paragraph.”

It was pretty severe, but I was nettled. However, it never phazed him; he
didn’t appear to know he was hurt. He began to talk and laugh, in happy,
thoughtless, boyish fashion, as we walked along, and made himself old
friends with me at once; asked me all sorts of questions about myself and
about my clothes, but never waited for an answer—always chattered
straight ahead, as if he didn’t know he had asked a question and wasn’t
expecting any reply, until at last he happened to mention that he was born in
the beginning of the year 513.
It made the cold chills creep over me! I stopped and said, a little faintly:
“Maybe I didn’t hear you just right. Say it again—and say it slow. What
year was it?”
“513.”
“513! You don’t look it! Come, my boy, I am a stranger and friendless; be
honest and honorable with me. Are you in your right mind?”

He said he was.
“Are these other people in their right minds?”

He said they were.
“And this isn’t an asylum? I mean, it isn’t a place where they cure crazy
people?”
He said it wasn’t.
“Well, then,” I said, “either I am a lunatic, or something just as awful has
happened. Now tell me, honest and true, where am I?”
“In King Arthur’s Court.”
I waited a minute, to let that idea shudder its way home, and then said:
“And according to your notions, what year is it now?”
“528—nineteenth of June.”
I felt a mournful sinking at the heart, and muttered: “I shall never see my
friends again—never, never again. They will not be born for more than
thirteen hundred years yet.”
I seemed to believe the boy, I didn’t know why. Something in me seemed
to believe him—my consciousness, as you may say; but my reason didn’t.
My reason straightway began to clamor; that was natural. I didn’t know
how to go about satisfying it, because I knew that the testimony of men
wouldn’t serve—my reason would say they were lunatics, and throw out
their evidence. But all of a sudden I stumbled on the very thing, just by
luck. I knew that the only total eclipse of the sun in the first half of the sixth
century occurred on the 21st of June, A.D. 528, O.S., and began at 3
minutes after 12 noon. I also knew that no total eclipse of the sun was due
in what to me was the present year—i.e., 1879. So, if I could keep my
anxiety and curiosity from eating the heart out of me for forty-eight hours, I
should then find out for certain whether this boy was telling me the truth or
not.
Wherefore, being a practical Connecticut man, I now shoved this whole
problem clear out of my mind till its appointed day and hour should come,
in order that I might turn all my attention to the circumstances of the
present moment, and be alert and ready to make the most out of them that
could be made. One thing at a time, is my motto—and just play that thing
for all it is worth, even if it’s only two pair and a jack. I made up my mind
to two things: if it was still the nineteenth century and I was among lunatics
and couldn’t get away, I would presently boss that asylum or know the
reason why; and if, on the other hand, it was really the sixth century, all

right, I didn’t want any softer thing: I would boss the whole country inside
of three months; for I judged I would have the start of the best-educated
man in the kingdom by a matter of thirteen hundred years and upward. I’m
not a man to waste time after my mind’s made up and there’s work on hand;
so I said to the page:
“Now, Clarence, my boy—if that might happen to be your name—I’ll get
you to post me up a little if you don’t mind. What is the name of that
apparition that brought me here?”
“My master and thine? That is the good knight and great lord Sir Kay the
Seneschal, foster brother to our liege the king.”
“Very good; go on, tell me everything.”
He made a long story of it; but the part that had immediate interest for me
was this: He said I was Sir Kay’s prisoner, and that in the due course of
custom I would be flung into a dungeon and left there on scant commons
until my friends ransomed me—unless I chanced to rot, first. I saw that the
last chance had the best show, but I didn’t waste any bother about that; time
was too precious. The page said, further, that dinner was about ended in the
great hall by this time, and that as soon as the sociability and the heavy
drinking should begin, Sir Kay would have me in and exhibit me before
King Arthur and his illustrious knights seated at the Table Round, and
would brag about his exploit in capturing me, and would probably
exaggerate the facts a little, but it wouldn’t be good form for me to correct
him, and not over safe, either; and when I was done being exhibited, then
ho for the dungeon; but he, Clarence, would find a way to come and see me
every now and then, and cheer me up, and help me get word to my friends.
Get word to my friends! I thanked him; I couldn’t do less; and about this
time a lackey came to say I was wanted; so Clarence led me in and took me
off to one side and sat down by me.
Well, it was a curious kind of spectacle, and interesting. It was an
immense place, and rather naked—yes, and full of loud contrasts. It was
very, very lofty; so lofty that the banners depending from the arched beams
and girders away up there floated in a sort of twilight; there was a stone-
railed gallery at each end, high up, with musicians in the one, and women,
clothed in stunning colors, in the other. The floor was of big stone flags laid
in black and white squares, rather battered by age and use, and needing
repair. As to ornament, there wasn’t any, strictly speaking; though on the

walls hung some huge tapestries which were probably taxed as works of art;
battle-pieces, they were, with horses shaped like those which children cut
out of paper or create in gingerbread; with men on them in scale armor
whose scales are represented by round holes—so that the man’s coat looks
as if it had been done with a biscuit-punch. There was a fireplace big
enough to camp in; and its projecting sides and hood, of carved and pillared
stonework, had the look of a cathedral door. Along the walls stood men-at-
arms, in breastplate and morion, with halberds for their only weapon—rigid
as statues; and that is what they looked like.
In the middle of this groined and vaulted public square was an oaken
table which they called the Table Round. It was as large as a circus ring;
and around it sat a great company of men dressed in such various and
splendid colors that it hurt one’s eyes to look at them. They wore their
plumed hats, right along, except that whenever one addressed himself
directly to the king, he lifted his hat a trifle just as he was beginning his
remark.
Mainly they were drinking—from entire ox horns; but a few were still
munching bread or gnawing beef bones. There was about an average of two
dogs to one man; and these sat in expectant attitudes till a spent bone was
flung to them, and then they went for it by brigades and divisions, with a
rush, and there ensued a fight which filled the prospect with a tumultuous
chaos of plunging heads and bodies and flashing tails, and the storm of
howlings and barkings deafened all speech for the time; but that was no
matter, for the dog-fight was always a bigger interest anyway; the men rose,
sometimes, to observe it the better and bet on it, and the ladies and the
musicians stretched themselves out over their balusters with the same
object; and all broke into delighted ejaculations from time to time. In the
end, the winning dog stretched himself out comfortably with his bone
between his paws, and proceeded to growl over it, and gnaw it, and grease
the floor with it, just as fifty others were already doing; and the rest of the
court resumed their previous industries and entertainments.
As a rule, the speech and behavior of these people were gracious and
courtly; and I noticed that they were good and serious listeners when
anybody was telling anything—I mean in a dog-fightless interval. And
plainly, too, they were a childlike and innocent lot; telling lies of the
stateliest pattern with a most gentle and winning naivety, and ready and

willing to listen to anybody else’s lie, and believe it, too. It was hard to
associate them with anything cruel or dreadful; and yet they dealt in tales of
blood and suffering with a guileless relish that made me almost forget to
shudder.
I was not the only prisoner present. There were twenty or more. Poor
devils, many of them were maimed, hacked, carved, in a frightful way; and
their hair, their faces, their clothing, were caked with black and stiffened
drenchings of blood. They were suffering sharp physical pain, of course;
and weariness, and hunger and thirst, no doubt; and at least none had given
them the comfort of a wash, or even the poor charity of a lotion for their
wounds; yet you never heard them utter a moan or a groan, or saw them
show any sign of restlessness, or any disposition to complain. The thought
was forced upon me: “The rascals—they have served other people so in
their day; it being their own turn, now, they were not expecting any better
treatment than this; so their philosophical bearing is not an outcome of
mental training, intellectual fortitude, reasoning; it is mere animal training;
they are white Indians.”

CHAPTER III.
KNIGHTS OF THE TABLE ROUND

Mainly the Round Table talk was monologues—narrative accounts of the
adventures in which these prisoners were captured and their friends and
backers killed and stripped of their steeds and armor. As a general thing—as
far as I could make out—these murderous adventures were not forays
undertaken to avenge injuries, nor to settle old disputes or sudden fallings
out; no, as a rule they were simply duels between strangers—duels between
people who had never even been introduced to each other, and between
whom existed no cause of offense whatever. Many a time I had seen a
couple of boys, strangers, meet by chance, and say simultaneously, “I can
lick you,” and go at it on the spot; but I had always imagined until now that
that sort of thing belonged to children only, and was a sign and mark of

childhood; but here were these big boobies sticking to it and taking pride in
it clear up into full age and beyond. Yet there was something very engaging
about these great simple-hearted creatures, something attractive and
lovable. There did not seem to be brains enough in the entire nursery, so to
speak, to bait a fish-hook with; but you didn’t seem to mind that, after a
little, because you soon saw that brains were not needed in a society like
that, and indeed would have marred it, hindered it, spoiled its symmetry—
perhaps rendered its existence impossible.
There was a fine manliness observable in almost every face; and in some
a certain loftiness and sweetness that rebuked your belittling criticisms and
stilled them. A most noble benignity and purity reposed in the countenance
of him they called Sir Galahad, and likewise in the king’s also; and there
was majesty and greatness in the giant frame and high bearing of Sir
Launcelot of the Lake.
There was presently an incident which centered the general interest upon
this Sir Launcelot. At a sign from a sort of master of ceremonies, six or
eight of the prisoners rose and came forward in a body and knelt on the
floor and lifted up their hands toward the ladies’ gallery and begged the
grace of a word with the queen. The most conspicuously situated lady in
that massed flower-bed of feminine show and finery inclined her head by
way of assent, and then the spokesman of the prisoners delivered himself
and his fellows into her hands for free pardon, ransom, captivity, or death,
as she in her good pleasure might elect; and this, as he said, he was doing
by command of Sir Kay the Seneschal, whose prisoners they were, he
having vanquished them by his single might and prowess in sturdy conflict
in the field.
Surprise and astonishment flashed from face to face all over the house;
the queen’s gratified smile faded out at the name of Sir Kay, and she looked
disappointed; and the page whispered in my ear with an accent and manner
expressive of extravagant derision—
“Sir Kay, forsooth! Oh, call me pet names, dearest, call me a marine! In
twice a thousand years shall the unholy invention of man labor at odds to
beget the fellow to this majestic lie!”
Every eye was fastened with severe inquiry upon Sir Kay. But he was
equal to the occasion. He got up and played his hand like a major—and
took every trick. He said he would state the case exactly according to the

facts; he would tell the simple straightforward tale, without comment of his
own; “and then,” said he, “if ye find glory and honor due, ye will give it
unto him who is the mightiest man of his hands that ever bare shield or
strake with sword in the ranks of Christian battle—even him that sitteth
there!” and he pointed to Sir Launcelot. Ah, he fetched them; it was a
rattling good stroke. Then he went on and told how Sir Launcelot, seeking
adventures, some brief time gone by, killed seven giants at one sweep of his
sword, and set a hundred and forty-two captive maidens free; and then went
further, still seeking adventures, and found him (Sir Kay) fighting a
desperate fight against nine foreign knights, and straightway took the battle
solely into his own hands, and conquered the nine; and that night Sir
Launcelot rose quietly, and dressed him in Sir Kay’s armor and took Sir
Kay’s horse and gat him away into distant lands, and vanquished sixteen
knights in one pitched battle and thirty-four in another; and all these and the
former nine he made to swear that about Whitsuntide they would ride to
Arthur’s court and yield them to Queen Guenever’s hands as captives of Sir
Kay the Seneschal, spoil of his knightly prowess; and now here were these
half dozen, and the rest would be along as soon as they might be healed of
their desperate wounds.
Well, it was touching to see the queen blush and smile, and look
embarrassed and happy, and fling furtive glances at Sir Launcelot that
would have got him shot in Arkansas, to a dead certainty.
Everybody praised the valor and magnanimity of Sir Launcelot; and as
for me, I was perfectly amazed, that one man, all by himself, should have
been able to beat down and capture such battalions of practiced fighters. I
said as much to Clarence; but this mocking featherhead only said:
“An Sir Kay had had time to get another skin of sour wine into him, ye
had seen the accompt doubled.”
I looked at the boy in sorrow; and as I looked I saw the cloud of a deep
despondency settle upon his countenance. I followed the direction of his
eye, and saw that a very old and white-bearded man, clothed in a flowing
black gown, had risen and was standing at the table upon unsteady legs, and
feebly swaying his ancient head and surveying the company with his watery
and wandering eye. The same suffering look that was in the page’s face was
observable in all the faces around—the look of dumb creatures who know
that they must endure and make no moan.

“Marry, we shall have it again,” sighed the boy; “that same old weary tale
that he hath told a thousand times in the same words, and that he will tell till
he dieth, every time he hath gotten his barrel full and feeleth his
exaggeration-mill a-working. Would God I had died or I saw this day!”
“Who is it?”
“Merlin, the mighty liar and magician, perdition singe him for the
weariness he worketh with his one tale! But that men fear him for that he
hath the storms and the lightnings and all the devils that be in hell at his
beck and call, they would have dug his entrails out these many years ago to
get at that tale and squelch it. He telleth it always in the third person,
making believe he is too modest to glorify himself—maledictions light
upon him, misfortune be his dole! Good friend, prithee call me for
evensong.”
The boy nestled himself upon my shoulder and pretended to go to sleep.
The old man began his tale; and presently the lad was asleep in reality; so
also were the dogs, and the court, the lackeys, and the files of men-at-arms.
The droning voice droned on; a soft snoring arose on all sides and
supported it like a deep and subdued accompaniment of wind instruments.
Some heads were bowed upon folded arms, some lay back with open
mouths that issued unconscious music; the flies buzzed and bit, unmolested,
the rats swarmed softly out from a hundred holes, and pattered about, and
made themselves at home everywhere; and one of them sat up like a
squirrel on the king’s head and held a bit of cheese in its hands and nibbled
it, and dribbled the crumbs in the king’s face with naive and impudent
irreverence. It was a tranquil scene, and restful to the weary eye and the
jaded spirit.

This was the old man’s tale. He said:
“Right so the king and Merlin departed, and went until an hermit that was
a good man and a great leech. So the hermit searched all his wounds and
gave him good salves; so the king was there three days, and then were his
wounds well amended that he might ride and go, and so departed. And as
they rode, Arthur said, I have no sword. No force,* [*Footnote from M.T.:
No matter.] said Merlin, hereby is a sword that shall be yours and I may. So
they rode till they came to a lake, the which was a fair water and broad, and
in the midst of the lake Arthur was ware of an arm clothed in white samite,
that held a fair sword in that hand. Lo, said Merlin, yonder is that sword
that I spake of. With that they saw a damsel going upon the lake. What
damsel is that? said Arthur. That is the Lady of the lake, said Merlin; and
within that lake is a rock, and therein is as fair a place as any on earth, and
richly beseen, and this damsel will come to you anon, and then speak ye fair
to her that she will give you that sword. Anon withal came the damsel unto
Arthur and saluted him, and he her again. Damsel, said Arthur, what sword
is that, that yonder the arm holdeth above the water? I would it were mine,
for I have no sword. Sir Arthur King, said the damsel, that sword is mine,
and if ye will give me a gift when I ask it you, ye shall have it. By my faith,
said Arthur, I will give you what gift ye will ask. Well, said the damsel, go
ye into yonder barge and row yourself to the sword, and take it and the
scabbard with you, and I will ask my gift when I see my time. So Sir Arthur
and Merlin alight, and tied their horses to two trees, and so they went into
the ship, and when they came to the sword that the hand held, Sir Arthur
took it up by the handles, and took it with him.

And the arm and the hand went under the water; and so they came unto
the land and rode forth. And then Sir Arthur saw a rich pavilion. What
signifieth yonder pavilion? It is the knight’s pavilion, said Merlin, that ye
fought with last, Sir Pellinore, but he is out, he is not there; he hath ado with
a knight of yours, that hight Egglame, and they have fought together, but at
the last Egglame fled, and else he had been dead, and he hath chased him
even to Carlion, and we shall meet with him anon in the highway. That is
well said, said Arthur, now have I a sword, now will I wage battle with him,
and be avenged on him. Sir, ye shall not so, said Merlin, for the knight is
weary of fighting and chasing, so that ye shall have no worship to have ado
with him; also, he will not lightly be matched of one knight living; and
therefore it is my counsel, let him pass, for he shall do you good service in
short time, and his sons, after his days. Also ye shall see that day in short
space ye shall be right glad to give him your sister to wed. When I see him,
I will do as ye advise me, said Arthur. Then Sir Arthur looked on the sword,
and liked it passing well. Whether liketh you better, said Merlin, the sword
or the scabbard? Me liketh better the sword, said Arthur. Ye are more
unwise, said Merlin, for the scabbard is worth ten of the sword, for while ye
have the scabbard upon you ye shall never lose no blood, be ye never so
sore wounded; therefore, keep well the scabbard always with you. So they
rode into Carlion, and by the way they met with Sir Pellinore; but Merlin
had done such a craft that Pellinore saw not Arthur, and he passed by
without any words. I marvel, said Arthur, that the knight would not speak.
Sir, said Merlin, he saw you not; for and he had seen you ye had not lightly

departed. So they came unto Carlion, whereof his knights were passing
glad. And when they heard of his adventures they marveled that he would
jeopard his person so alone. But all men of worship said it was merry to be
under such a chieftain that would put his person in adventure as other poor
knights did.”

CHAPTER IV.
SIR DINADAN THE HUMORIST

It seemed to me that this quaint lie was most simply and beautifully told;
but then I had heard it only once, and that makes a difference; it was
pleasant to the others when it was fresh, no doubt.
Sir Dinadan the Humorist was the first to awake, and he soon roused the
rest with a practical joke of a sufficiently poor quality. He tied some metal
mugs to a dog’s tail and turned him loose, and he tore around and around
the place in a frenzy of fright, with all the other dogs bellowing after him
and battering and crashing against everything that came in their way and
making altogether a chaos of confusion and a most deafening din and

turmoil; at which every man and woman of the multitude laughed till the
tears flowed, and some fell out of their chairs and wallowed on the floor in
ecstasy. It was just like so many children. Sir Dinadan was so proud of his
exploit that he could not keep from telling over and over again, to
weariness, how the immortal idea happened to occur to him; and as is the
way with humorists of his breed, he was still laughing at it after everybody
else had got through.

He was so set up that he concluded to make a speech—of course a
humorous speech. I think I never heard so many old played-out jokes strung
together in my life. He was worse than the minstrels, worse than the clown
in the circus. It seemed peculiarly sad to sit here, thirteen hundred years
before I was born, and listen again to poor, flat, worm-eaten jokes that had
given me the dry gripes when I was a boy thirteen hundred years
afterwards. It about convinced me that there isn’t any such thing as a new
joke possible. Everybody laughed at these antiquities—but then they always
do; I had noticed that, centuries later. However, of course the scoffer didn’t
laugh—I mean the boy. No, he scoffed; there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t

scoff at. He said the most of Sir Dinadan’s jokes were rotten and the rest
were petrified. I said “petrified” was good; as I believed, myself, that the
only right way to classify the majestic ages of some of those jokes was by
geologic periods. But that neat idea hit the boy in a blank place, for geology
hadn’t been invented yet. However, I made a note of the remark, and
calculated to educate the commonwealth up to it if I pulled through. It is no
use to throw a good thing away merely because the market isn’t ripe yet.
Now Sir Kay arose and began to fire up on his history-mill with me for
fuel. It was time for me to feel serious, and I did. Sir Kay told how he had
encountered me in a far land of barbarians, who all wore the same
ridiculous garb that I did—a garb that was a work of enchantment, and
intended to make the wearer secure from hurt by human hands. However he
had nullified the force of the enchantment by prayer, and had killed my
thirteen knights in a three hours’ battle, and taken me prisoner, sparing my
life in order that so strange a curiosity as I was might be exhibited to the
wonder and admiration of the king and the court. He spoke of me all the
time, in the blandest way, as “this prodigious giant,” and “this horrible sky-
towering monster,” and “this tusked and taloned man-devouring ogre”, and
everybody took in all this bosh in the naivest way, and never smiled or
seemed to notice that there was any discrepancy between these watered
statistics and me. He said that in trying to escape from him I sprang into the
top of a tree two hundred cubits high at a single bound, but he dislodged me
with a stone the size of a cow, which “all-to brast” the most of my bones,
and then swore me to appear at Arthur’s court for sentence. He ended by
condemning me to die at noon on the 21st; and was so little concerned
about it that he stopped to yawn before he named the date.
I was in a dismal state by this time; indeed, I was hardly enough in my
right mind to keep the run of a dispute that sprung up as to how I had better
be killed, the possibility of the killing being doubted by some, because of
the enchantment in my clothes. And yet it was nothing but an ordinary suit
of fifteen-dollar slop-shops. Still, I was sane enough to notice this detail, to
wit: many of the terms used in the most matter-of-fact way by this great
assemblage of the first ladies and gentlemen in the land would have made a
Comanche blush.

Indelicacy is too mild a term to convey the idea. However, I had read
“Tom Jones,” and “Roderick Random,” and other books of that kind, and
knew that the highest and first ladies and gentlemen in England had
remained little or no cleaner in their talk, and in the morals and conduct
which such talk implies, clear up to a hundred years ago; in fact clear into
our own nineteenth century—in which century, broadly speaking, the
earliest samples of the real lady and real gentleman discoverable in English
history—or in European history, for that matter—may be said to have made
their appearance. Suppose Sir Walter, instead of putting the conversations
into the mouths of his characters, had allowed the characters to speak for
themselves? We should have had talk from Rebecca and Ivanhoe and the
soft lady Rowena which would embarrass a tramp in our day. However, to
the unconsciously indelicate all things are delicate. King Arthur’s people
were not aware that they were indecent and I had presence of mind enough
not to mention it.
They were so troubled about my enchanted clothes that they were
mightily relieved, at last, when old Merlin swept the difficulty away for

them with a common-sense hint. He asked them why they were so dull—
why didn’t it occur to them to strip me. In half a minute I was as naked as a
pair of tongs! And dear, dear, to think of it: I was the only embarrassed
person there. Everybody discussed me; and did it as unconcernedly as if I
had been a cabbage. Queen Guenever was as naively interested as the rest,
and said she had never seen anybody with legs just like mine before. It was
the only compliment I got—if it was a compliment.
Finally I was carried off in one direction, and my perilous clothes in
another. I was shoved into a dark and narrow cell in a dungeon, with some
scant remnants for dinner, some moldy straw for a bed, and no end of rats
for company.

CHAPTER V.
AN INSPIRATION

I was so tired that even my fears were not able to keep me awake long.
When I next came to myself, I seemed to have been asleep a very long
time. My first thought was, “Well, what an astonishing dream I’ve had! I
reckon I’ve waked only just in time to keep from being hanged or drowned
or burned or something.... I’ll nap again till the whistle blows, and then I’ll
go down to the arms factory and have it out with Hercules.”
But just then I heard the harsh music of rusty chains and bolts, a light
flashed in my eyes, and that butterfly, Clarence, stood before me! I gasped
with surprise; my breath almost got away from me.

“What!” I said, “you here yet? Go along with the rest of the dream!
scatter!”
But he only laughed, in his light-hearted way, and fell to making fun of
my sorry plight.
“All right,” I said resignedly, “let the dream go on; I’m in no hurry.”
“Prithee what dream?”
“What dream? Why, the dream that I am in Arthur’s court—a person who
never existed; and that I am talking to you, who are nothing but a work of
the imagination.”
“Oh, la, indeed! and is it a dream that you’re to be burned to-morrow?
Ho-ho—answer me that!”
The shock that went through me was distressing. I now began to reason
that my situation was in the last degree serious, dream or no dream; for I
knew by past experience of the lifelike intensity of dreams, that to be
burned to death, even in a dream, would be very far from being a jest, and
was a thing to be avoided, by any means, fair or foul, that I could contrive.
So I said beseechingly:
“Ah, Clarence, good boy, only friend I’ve got,—for you are my friend,
aren’t you?—don’t fail me; help me to devise some way of escaping from
this place!”
“Now do but hear thyself! Escape? Why, man, the corridors are in guard
and keep of men-at-arms.”
“No doubt, no doubt. But how many, Clarence? Not many, I hope?”
“Full a score. One may not hope to escape.” After a pause—hesitatingly:
“and there be other reasons—and weightier.”
“Other ones? What are they?”
“Well, they say—oh, but I daren’t, indeed daren’t!”
“Why, poor lad, what is the matter? Why do you blench? Why do you
tremble so?”
“Oh, in sooth, there is need! I do want to tell you, but—”
“Come, come, be brave, be a man—speak out, there’s a good lad!”
He hesitated, pulled one way by desire, the other way by fear; then he
stole to the door and peeped out, listening; and finally crept close to me and
put his mouth to my ear and told me his fearful news in a whisper, and with

all the cowering apprehension of one who was venturing upon awful ground
and speaking of things whose very mention might be freighted with death.
“Merlin, in his malice, has woven a spell about this dungeon, and there
bides not the man in these kingdoms that would be desperate enough to
essay to cross its lines with you! Now God pity me, I have told it! Ah, be
kind to me, be merciful to a poor boy who means thee well; for an thou
betray me I am lost!”
I laughed the only really refreshing laugh I had had for some time; and
shouted:
“Merlin has wrought a spell! Merlin, forsooth! That cheap old humbug,
that maundering old ass? Bosh, pure bosh, the silliest bosh in the world!
Why, it does seem to me that of all the childish, idiotic, chuckle-headed,
chicken-livered superstitions that ev—oh, damn Merlin!”
But Clarence had slumped to his knees before I had half finished, and he
was like to go out of his mind with fright.
“Oh, beware! These are awful words! Any moment these walls may
crumble upon us if you say such things. Oh call them back before it is too
late!”

Now this strange exhibition gave me a good idea and set me to thinking.
If everybody about here was so honestly and sincerely afraid of Merlin’s
pretended magic as Clarence was, certainly a superior man like me ought to

be shrewd enough to contrive some way to take advantage of such a state of
things. I went on thinking, and worked out a plan. Then I said:
“Get up. Pull yourself together; look me in the eye. Do you know why I
laughed?”
“No—but for our blessed Lady’s sake, do it no more.”
“Well, I’ll tell you why I laughed. Because I’m a magician myself.”
“Thou!” The boy recoiled a step, and caught his breath, for the thing hit
him rather sudden; but the aspect which he took on was very, very
respectful. I took quick note of that; it indicated that a humbug didn’t need
to have a reputation in this asylum; people stood ready to take him at his
word, without that. I resumed.
“I’ve known Merlin seven hundred years, and he—”
“Seven hun—”
“Don’t interrupt me. He has died and come alive again thirteen times, and
traveled under a new name every time: Smith, Jones, Robinson, Jackson,
Peters, Haskins, Merlin—a new alias every time he turns up. I knew him in
Egypt three hundred years ago; I knew him in India five hundred years ago
—he is always blethering around in my way, everywhere I go; he makes me
tired. He don’t amount to shucks, as a magician; knows some of the old
common tricks, but has never got beyond the rudiments, and never will. He
is well enough for the provinces—one-night stands and that sort of thing,
you know—but dear me, he oughtn’t to set up for an expert—anyway not
where there’s a real artist. Now look here, Clarence, I am going to stand
your friend, right along, and in return you must be mine. I want you to do
me a favor. I want you to get word to the king that I am a magician myself
—and the Supreme Grand High-yu-Muck-amuck and head of the tribe, at
that; and I want him to be made to understand that I am just quietly
arranging a little calamity here that will make the fur fly in these realms if
Sir Kay’s project is carried out and any harm comes to me. Will you get that
to the king for me?”
The poor boy was in such a state that he could hardly answer me. It was
pitiful to see a creature so terrified, so unnerved, so demoralized. But he
promised everything; and on my side he made me promise over and over
again that I would remain his friend, and never turn against him or cast any

enchantments upon him. Then he worked his way out, staying himself with
his hand along the wall, like a sick person.
Presently this thought occurred to me: how heedless I have been! When
the boy gets calm, he will wonder why a great magician like me should
have begged a boy like him to help me get out of this place; he will put this
and that together, and will see that I am a humbug.
I worried over that heedless blunder for an hour, and called myself a
great many hard names, meantime. But finally it occurred to me all of a
sudden that these animals didn’t reason; that they never put this and that
together; that all their talk showed that they didn’t know a discrepancy
when they saw it. I was at rest, then.
But as soon as one is at rest, in this world, off he goes on something else
to worry about. It occurred to me that I had made another blunder: I had
sent the boy off to alarm his betters with a threat—I intending to invent a
calamity at my leisure; now the people who are the readiest and eagerest
and willingest to swallow miracles are the very ones who are hungriest to
see you perform them; suppose I should be called on for a sample? Suppose
I should be asked to name my calamity? Yes, I had made a blunder; I ought
to have invented my calamity first. “What shall I do? what can I say, to gain
a little time?” I was in trouble again; in the deepest kind of trouble...
“There’s a footstep!—they’re coming. If I had only just a moment to
think.... Good, I’ve got it. I’m all right.”
You see, it was the eclipse. It came into my mind in the nick of time, how
Columbus, or Cortez, or one of those people, played an eclipse as a saving
trump once, on some savages, and I saw my chance. I could play it myself,
now, and it wouldn’t be any plagiarism, either, because I should get it in
nearly a thousand years ahead of those parties.
Clarence came in, subdued, distressed, and said:

“I hasted the message to our liege the king, and straightway he had me to
his presence. He was frighted even to the marrow, and was minded to give
order for your instant enlargement, and that you be clothed in fine raiment
and lodged as befitted one so great; but then came Merlin and spoiled all;
for he persuaded the king that you are mad, and know not whereof you
speak; and said your threat is but foolishness and idle vaporing. They
disputed long, but in the end, Merlin, scoffing, said, ‘Wherefore hath he not
named his brave calamity? Verily it is because he cannot.’ This thrust did in
a most sudden sort close the king’s mouth, and he could offer naught to turn
the argument; and so, reluctant, and full loth to do you the discourtesy, he
yet prayeth you to consider his perplexed case, as noting how the matter
stands, and name the calamity—if so be you have determined the nature of
it and the time of its coming. Oh, prithee delay not; to delay at such a time
were to double and treble the perils that already compass thee about. Oh, be
thou wise—name the calamity!”
I allowed silence to accumulate while I got my impressiveness together,
and then said:
“How long have I been shut up in this hole?”
“Ye were shut up when yesterday was well spent. It is 9 of the morning
now.”
“No! Then I have slept well, sure enough. Nine in the morning now! And
yet it is the very complexion of midnight, to a shade. This is the 20th,
then?”
“The 20th—yes.”
“And I am to be burned alive to-morrow.” The boy shuddered.

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

CHAPTER VI.
THE ECLIPSE

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

But it is a blessed provision of nature that at times like these, as soon as a
man’s mercury has got down to a certain point there comes a revulsion, and
he rallies. Hope springs up, and cheerfulness along with it, and then he is in
good shape to do something for himself, if anything can be done. When my
rally came, it came with a bound. I said to myself that my eclipse would be
sure to save me, and make me the greatest man in the kingdom besides; and
straightway my mercury went up to the top of the tube, and my solicitudes
all vanished. I was as happy a man as there was in the world. I was even
impatient for to-morrow to come, I so wanted to gather in that great triumph
and be the center of all the nation’s wonder and reverence. Besides, in a
business way it would be the making of me; I knew that.
Meantime there was one thing which had got pushed into the background
of my mind. That was the half-conviction that when the nature of my
proposed calamity should be reported to those superstitious people, it would
have such an effect that they would want to compromise. So, by and by
when I heard footsteps coming, that thought was recalled to me, and I said
to myself, “As sure as anything, it’s the compromise. Well, if it is good, all
right, I will accept; but if it isn’t, I mean to stand my ground and play my
hand for all it is worth.”
The door opened, and some men-at-arms appeared. The leader said:
“The stake is ready. Come!”
The stake! The strength went out of me, and I almost fell down. It is hard
to get one’s breath at such a time, such lumps come into one’s throat, and
such gaspings; but as soon as I could speak, I said:
“But this is a mistake—the execution is to-morrow.”
“Order changed; been set forward a day. Haste thee!”
I was lost. There was no help for me. I was dazed, stupefied; I had no
command over myself, I only wandered purposely about, like one out of his
mind; so the soldiers took hold of me, and pulled me along with them, out
of the cell and along the maze of underground corridors, and finally into the
fierce glare of daylight and the upper world. As we stepped into the vast
enclosed court of the castle I got a shock; for the first thing I saw was the
stake, standing in the center, and near it the piled fagots and a monk. On all
four sides of the court the seated multitudes rose rank above rank, forming
sloping terraces that were rich with color. The king and the queen sat in
their thrones, the most conspicuous figures there, of course.

To note all this, occupied but a second. The next second Clarence had
slipped from some place of concealment and was pouring news into my ear,
his eyes beaming with triumph and gladness. He said:
“’Tis through me the change was wrought! And main hard have I worked
to do it, too. But when I revealed to them the calamity in store, and saw
how mighty was the terror it did engender, then saw I also that this was the
time to strike! Wherefore I diligently pretended, unto this and that and the
other one, that your power against the sun could not reach its full until the
morrow; and so if any would save the sun and the world, you must be slain
to-day, while your enchantments are but in the weaving and lack potency.
Odsbodikins, it was but a dull lie, a most indifferent invention, but you
should have seen them seize it and swallow it, in the frenzy of their fright,
as it were salvation sent from heaven; and all the while was I laughing in
my sleeve the one moment, to see them so cheaply deceived, and glorifying
God the next, that He was content to let the meanest of His creatures be His
instrument to the saving of thy life. Ah how happy has the matter sped! You
will not need to do the sun a real hurt—ah, forget not that, on your soul
forget it not! Only make a little darkness—only the littlest little darkness,
mind, and cease with that. It will be sufficient. They will see that I spoke
falsely,—being ignorant, as they will fancy—and with the falling of the first
shadow of that darkness you shall see them go mad with fear; and they will
set you free and make you great! Go to thy triumph, now! But remember—
ah, good friend, I implore thee remember my supplication, and do the
blessed sun no hurt. For my sake, thy true friend.”
I choked out some words through my grief and misery; as much as to say
I would spare the sun; for which the lad’s eyes paid me back with such deep
and loving gratitude that I had not the heart to tell him his good-hearted
foolishness had ruined me and sent me to my death.

As the soldiers assisted me across the court the stillness was so profound
that if I had been blindfold I should have supposed I was in a solitude
instead of walled in by four thousand people. There was not a movement
perceptible in those masses of humanity; they were as rigid as stone images,
and as pale; and dread sat upon every countenance. This hush continued
while I was being chained to the stake; it still continued while the fagots
were carefully and tediously piled about my ankles, my knees, my thighs,
my body. Then there was a pause, and a deeper hush, if possible, and a man
knelt down at my feet with a blazing torch; the multitude strained forward,
gazing, and parting slightly from their seats without knowing it; the monk
raised his hands above my head, and his eyes toward the blue sky, and
began some words in Latin; in this attitude he droned on and on, a little
while, and then stopped. I waited two or three moments; then looked up; he
was standing there petrified. With a common impulse the multitude rose
slowly up and stared into the sky. I followed their eyes, as sure as guns,
there was my eclipse beginning! The life went boiling through my veins; I
was a new man! The rim of black spread slowly into the sun’s disk, my

heart beat higher and higher, and still the assemblage and the priest stared
into the sky, motionless. I knew that this gaze would be turned upon me,
next. When it was, I was ready. I was in one of the most grand attitudes I
ever struck, with my arm stretched up pointing to the sun. It was a noble
effect. You could see the shudder sweep the mass like a wave. Two shouts
rang out, one close upon the heels of the other:
“Apply the torch!”
“I forbid it!”
The one was from Merlin, the other from the king. Merlin started from
his place—to apply the torch himself, I judged. I said:
“Stay where you are. If any man moves—even the king—before I give
him leave, I will blast him with thunder, I will consume him with
lightnings!”
The multitude sank meekly into their seats, and I was just expecting they
would. Merlin hesitated a moment or two, and I was on pins and needles
during that little while. Then he sat down, and I took a good breath; for I
knew I was master of the situation now. The king said:
“Be merciful, fair sir, and essay no further in this perilous matter, lest
disaster follow. It was reported to us that your powers could not attain unto
their full strength until the morrow; but—”
“Your Majesty thinks the report may have been a lie? It was a lie.”
That made an immense effect; up went appealing hands everywhere, and
the king was assailed with a storm of supplications that I might be bought
off at any price, and the calamity stayed. The king was eager to comply. He
said:
“Name any terms, reverend sir, even to the halving of my kingdom; but
banish this calamity, spare the sun!”
My fortune was made. I would have taken him up in a minute, but I
couldn’t stop an eclipse; the thing was out of the question. So I asked time
to consider. The king said:
“How long—ah, how long, good sir? Be merciful; look, it groweth
darker, moment by moment. Prithee how long?”
“Not long. Half an hour—maybe an hour.”

There were a thousand pathetic protests, but I couldn’t shorten up any, for
I couldn’t remember how long a total eclipse lasts. I was in a puzzled
condition, anyway, and wanted to think. Something was wrong about that
eclipse, and the fact was very unsettling. If this wasn’t the one I was after,
how was I to tell whether this was the sixth century, or nothing but a
dream? Dear me, if I could only prove it was the latter! Here was a glad
new hope. If the boy was right about the date, and this was surely the 20th,
it wasn’t the sixth century. I reached for the monk’s sleeve, in considerable
excitement, and asked him what day of the month it was.
Hang him, he said it was the twenty-first! It made me turn cold to hear
him. I begged him not to make any mistake about it; but he was sure; he
knew it was the 21st. So, that feather-headed boy had botched things again!
The time of the day was right for the eclipse; I had seen that for myself, in
the beginning, by the dial that was near by. Yes, I was in King Arthur’s
court, and I might as well make the most out of it I could.
The darkness was steadily growing, the people becoming more and more
distressed. I now said:
“I have reflected, Sir King. For a lesson, I will let this darkness proceed,
and spread night in the world; but whether I blot out the sun for good, or
restore it, shall rest with you. These are the terms, to wit: You shall remain
king over all your dominions, and receive all the glories and honors that
belong to the kingship; but you shall appoint me your perpetual minister
and executive, and give me for my services one per cent of such actual
increase of revenue over and above its present amount as I may succeed in
creating for the state. If I can’t live on that, I sha’n’t ask anybody to give me
a lift. Is it satisfactory?”
There was a prodigious roar of applause, and out of the midst of it the
king’s voice rose, saying:
“Away with his bonds, and set him free! and do him homage, high and
low, rich and poor, for he is become the king’s right hand, is clothed with
power and authority, and his seat is upon the highest step of the throne!
Now sweep away this creeping night, and bring the light and cheer again,
that all the world may bless thee.”
But I said:
“That a common man should be shamed before the world, is nothing; but
it were dishonor to the king if any that saw his minister naked should not

also see him delivered from his shame. If I might ask that my clothes be
brought again—”
“They are not meet,” the king broke in. “Fetch raiment of another sort;
clothe him like a prince!”
My idea worked. I wanted to keep things as they were till the eclipse was
total, otherwise they would be trying again to get me to dismiss the
darkness, and of course I couldn’t do it. Sending for the clothes gained
some delay, but not enough. So I had to make another excuse. I said it
would be but natural if the king should change his mind and repent to some
extent of what he had done under excitement; therefore I would let the
darkness grow a while, and if at the end of a reasonable time the king had
kept his mind the same, the darkness should be dismissed. Neither the king
nor anybody else was satisfied with that arrangement, but I had to stick to
my point.

It grew darker and darker and blacker and blacker, while I struggled with
those awkward sixth-century clothes. It got to be pitch dark, at last, and the
multitude groaned with horror to feel the cold uncanny night breezes fan

through the place and see the stars come out and twinkle in the sky. At last
the eclipse was total, and I was very glad of it, but everybody else was in
misery; which was quite natural. I said:
“The king, by his silence, still stands to the terms.” Then I lifted up my
hands—stood just so a moment—then I said, with the most awful
solemnity: “Let the enchantment dissolve and pass harmless away!”
There was no response, for a moment, in that deep darkness and that
graveyard hush. But when the silver rim of the sun pushed itself out, a
moment or two later, the assemblage broke loose with a vast shout and
came pouring down like a deluge to smother me with blessings and
gratitude; and Clarence was not the last of the wash, to be sure.

CHAPTER VII.
MERLIN’S TOWER

Inasmuch as I was now the second personage in the Kingdom, as far as
political power and authority were concerned, much was made of me. My
raiment was of silks and velvets and cloth of gold, and by consequence was
very showy, also uncomfortable. But habit would soon reconcile me to my
clothes; I was aware of that. I was given the choicest suite of apartments in
the castle, after the king’s. They were aglow with loud-colored silken
hangings, but the stone floors had nothing but rushes on them for a carpet,
and they were misfit rushes at that, being not all of one breed. As for
conveniences, properly speaking, there weren’t any. I mean little
conveniences; it is the little conveniences that make the real comfort of life.

The big oaken chairs, graced with rude carvings, were well enough, but that
was the stopping place. There was no soap, no matches, no looking-glass—
except a metal one, about as powerful as a pail of water. And not a chromo.
I had been used to chromos for years, and I saw now that without my
suspecting it a passion for art had got worked into the fabric of my being,
and was become a part of me.

It made me homesick to look around over this proud and gaudy but
heartless barrenness and remember that in our house in East Hartford, all
unpretending as it was, you couldn’t go into a room but you would find an
insurance-chromo, or at least a three-color God-Bless-Our-Home over the
door; and in the parlor we had nine. But here, even in my grand room of
state, there wasn’t anything in the nature of a picture except a thing the size
of a bedquilt, which was either woven or knitted (it had darned places in it),
and nothing in it was the right color or the right shape; and as for
proportions, even Raphael himself couldn’t have botched them more
formidably, after all his practice on those nightmares they call his
“celebrated Hampton Court cartoons.” Raphael was a bird. We had several

of his chromos; one was his “Miraculous Draught of Fishes,” where he puts
in a miracle of his own—puts three men into a canoe which wouldn’t have
held a dog without upsetting. I always admired to study R.’s art, it was so
fresh and unconventional.
There wasn’t even a bell or a speaking-tube in the castle. I had a great
many servants, and those that were on duty lolled in the anteroom; and
when I wanted one of them I had to go and call for him. There was no gas,
there were no candles; a bronze dish half full of boarding-house butter with
a blazing rag floating in it was the thing that produced what was regarded as
light. A lot of these hung along the walls and modified the dark, just toned it
down enough to make it dismal. If you went out at night, your servants
carried torches. There were no books, pens, paper or ink, and no glass in the
openings they believed to be windows. It is a little thing—glass is—until it
is absent, then it becomes a big thing. But perhaps the worst of all was, that
there wasn’t any sugar, coffee, tea, or tobacco. I saw that I was just another
Robinson Crusoe cast away on an uninhabited island, with no society but
some more or less tame animals, and if I wanted to make life bearable I
must do as he did—invent, contrive, create, reorganize things; set brain and
hand to work, and keep them busy. Well, that was in my line.
One thing troubled me along at first—the immense interest which people
took in me. Apparently the whole nation wanted a look at me. It soon
transpired that the eclipse had scared the British world almost to death; that
while it lasted the whole country, from one end to the other, was in a
pitiable state of panic, and the churches, hermitages, and monkeries
overflowed with praying and weeping poor creatures who thought the end
of the world was come. Then had followed the news that the producer of
this awful event was a stranger, a mighty magician at Arthur’s court; that he
could have blown out the sun like a candle, and was just going to do it when
his mercy was purchased, and he then dissolved his enchantments, and was
now recognized and honored as the man who had by his unaided might
saved the globe from destruction and its peoples from extinction. Now if
you consider that everybody believed that, and not only believed it, but
never even dreamed of doubting it, you will easily understand that there
was not a person in all Britain that would not have walked fifty miles to get
a sight of me. Of course I was all the talk—all other subjects were dropped;
even the king became suddenly a person of minor interest and notoriety.
Within twenty-four hours the delegations began to arrive, and from that

time onward for a fortnight they kept coming. The village was crowded, and
all the countryside. I had to go out a dozen times a day and show myself to
these reverent and awe-stricken multitudes.

It came to be a great burden, as to time and trouble, but of course it was
at the same time compensatingly agreeable to be so celebrated and such a
center of homage. It turned Brer Merlin green with envy and spite, which
was a great satisfaction to me. But there was one thing I couldn’t
understand—nobody had asked for an autograph. I spoke to Clarence about
it. By George! I had to explain to him what it was. Then he said nobody in
the country could read or write but a few dozen priests. Land! think of that.
There was another thing that troubled me a little. Those multitudes
presently began to agitate for another miracle. That was natural. To be able
to carry back to their far homes the boast that they had seen the man who
could command the sun, riding in the heavens, and be obeyed, would make
them great in the eyes of their neighbors, and envied by them all; but to be
able to also say they had seen him work a miracle themselves—why, people
would come a distance to see them. The pressure got to be pretty strong.
There was going to be an eclipse of the moon, and I knew the date and hour,
but it was too far away. Two years. I would have given a good deal for
license to hurry it up and use it now when there was a big market for it. It
seemed a great pity to have it wasted so, and come lagging along at a time
when a body wouldn’t have any use for it, as like as not. If it had been
booked for only a month away, I could have sold it short; but, as matters
stood, I couldn’t seem to cipher out any way to make it do me any good, so
I gave up trying. Next, Clarence found that old Merlin was making himself

busy on the sly among those people. He was spreading a report that I was a
humbug, and that the reason I didn’t accommodate the people with a
miracle was because I couldn’t. I saw that I must do something. I presently
thought out a plan.
By my authority as executive I threw Merlin into prison—the same cell I
had occupied myself. Then I gave public notice by herald and trumpet that I
should be busy with affairs of state for a fortnight, but about the end of that
time I would take a moment’s leisure and blow up Merlin’s stone tower by
fires from heaven; in the meantime, whoso listened to evil reports about me,
let him beware. Furthermore, I would perform but this one miracle at this
time, and no more; if it failed to satisfy and any murmured, I would turn the
murmurers into horses, and make them useful. Quiet ensued.
I took Clarence into my confidence, to a certain degree, and we went to
work privately. I told him that this was a sort of miracle that required a trifle
of preparation, and that it would be sudden death to ever talk about these
preparations to anybody. That made his mouth safe enough. Clandestinely
we made a few bushels of first-rate blasting powder, and I superintended
my armorers while they constructed a lightning-rod and some wires. This
old stone tower was very massive—and rather ruinous, too, for it was
Roman, and four hundred years old. Yes, and handsome, after a rude
fashion, and clothed with ivy from base to summit, as with a shirt of scale
mail. It stood on a lonely eminence, in good view from the castle, and about
half a mile away.
Working by night, we stowed the powder in the tower—dug stones out,
on the inside, and buried the powder in the walls themselves, which were
fifteen feet thick at the base. We put in a peck at a time, in a dozen places.
We could have blown up the Tower of London with these charges. When
the thirteenth night was come we put up our lightning-rod, bedded it in one
of the batches of powder, and ran wires from it to the other batches.
Everybody had shunned that locality from the day of my proclamation, but
on the morning of the fourteenth I thought best to warn the people, through
the heralds, to keep clear away—a quarter of a mile away. Then added, by
command, that at some time during the twenty-four hours I would
consummate the miracle, but would first give a brief notice; by flags on the
castle towers if in the daytime, by torch-baskets in the same places if at
night.

Thunder-showers had been tolerably frequent of late, and I was not much
afraid of a failure; still, I shouldn’t have cared for a delay of a day or two; I
should have explained that I was busy with affairs of state yet, and the
people must wait.
Of course, we had a blazing sunny day—almost the first one without a
cloud for three weeks; things always happen so. I kept secluded, and
watched the weather. Clarence dropped in from time to time and said the
public excitement was growing and growing all the time, and the whole
country filling up with human masses as far as one could see from the
battlements. At last the wind sprang up and a cloud appeared—in the right
quarter, too, and just at nightfall. For a little while I watched that distant
cloud spread and blacken, then I judged it was time for me to appear. I
ordered the torch-baskets to be lit, and Merlin liberated and sent to me. A
quarter of an hour later I ascended the parapet and there found the king and
the court assembled and gazing off in the darkness toward Merlin’s Tower.
Already the darkness was so heavy that one could not see far; these people
and the old turrets, being partly in deep shadow and partly in the red glow
from the great torch-baskets overhead, made a good deal of a picture.
Merlin arrived in a gloomy mood. I said:
“You wanted to burn me alive when I had not done you any harm, and
latterly you have been trying to injure my professional reputation. Therefore
I am going to call down fire and blow up your tower, but it is only fair to
give you a chance; now if you think you can break my enchantments and
ward off the fires, step to the bat, it’s your innings.”
“I can, fair sir, and I will. Doubt it not.”
He drew an imaginary circle on the stones of the roof, and burnt a pinch
of powder in it, which sent up a small cloud of aromatic smoke, whereat
everybody fell back and began to cross themselves and get uncomfortable.
Then he began to mutter and make passes in the air with his hands. He
worked himself up slowly and gradually into a sort of frenzy, and got to
thrashing around with his arms like the sails of a windmill. By this time the
storm had about reached us; the gusts of wind were flaring the torches and
making the shadows swash about, the first heavy drops of rain were falling,
the world abroad was black as pitch, the lightning began to wink fitfully. Of
course, my rod would be loading itself now. In fact, things were imminent.
So I said:

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

I made about three passes in the air, and then there was an awful crash
and that old tower leaped into the sky in chunks, along with a vast volcanic
fountain of fire that turned night to noonday, and showed a thousand acres
of human beings groveling on the ground in a general collapse of
consternation. Well, it rained mortar and masonry the rest of the week. This
was the report; but probably the facts would have modified it.
It was an effective miracle. The great bothersome temporary population
vanished. There were a good many thousand tracks in the mud the next
morning, but they were all outward bound. If I had advertised another
miracle I couldn’t have raised an audience with a sheriff.
Merlin’s stock was flat. The king wanted to stop his wages; he even
wanted to banish him, but I interfered. I said he would be useful to work the
weather, and attend to small matters like that, and I would give him a lift
now and then when his poor little parlor-magic soured on him. There wasn’t

a rag of his tower left, but I had the government rebuild it for him, and
advised him to take boarders; but he was too high-toned for that. And as for
being grateful, he never even said thank you. He was a rather hard lot, take
him how you might; but then you couldn’t fairly expect a man to be sweet
that had been set back so.

CHAPTER VIII.
THE BOSS

To be vested with enormous authority is a fine thing; but to have the on-
looking world consent to it is a finer. The tower episode solidified my
power, and made it impregnable. If any were perchance disposed to be
jealous and critical before that, they experienced a change of heart, now.
There was not any one in the kingdom who would have considered it good
judgment to meddle with my matters.
I was fast getting adjusted to my situation and circumstances. For a time,
I used to wake up, mornings, and smile at my “dream,” and listen for the
Colt’s factory whistle; but that sort of thing played itself out, gradually, and
at last I was fully able to realize that I was actually living in the sixth
century, and in Arthur’s court, not a lunatic asylum. After that, I was just as

much at home in that century as I could have been in any other; and as for
preference, I wouldn’t have traded it for the twentieth. Look at the
opportunities here for a man of knowledge, brains, pluck, and enterprise to
sail in and grow up with the country. The grandest field that ever was; and
all my own; not a competitor; not a man who wasn’t a baby to me in
acquirements and capacities; whereas, what would I amount to in the
twentieth century? I should be foreman of a factory, that is about all; and
could drag a seine down street any day and catch a hundred better men than
myself.
What a jump I had made! I couldn’t keep from thinking about it, and
contemplating it, just as one does who has struck oil. There was nothing
back of me that could approach it, unless it might be Joseph’s case; and
Joseph’s only approached it, it didn’t equal it, quite. For it stands to reason
that as Joseph’s splendid financial ingenuities advantaged nobody but the
king, the general public must have regarded him with a good deal of
disfavor, whereas I had done my entire public a kindness in sparing the sun,
and was popular by reason of it.
I was no shadow of a king; I was the substance; the king himself was the
shadow. My power was colossal; and it was not a mere name, as such things
have generally been, it was the genuine article. I stood here, at the very
spring and source of the second great period of the world’s history; and
could see the trickling stream of that history gather and deepen and
broaden, and roll its mighty tides down the far centuries; and I could note
the upspringing of adventurers like myself in the shelter of its long array of
thrones: De Montforts, Gavestons, Mortimers, Villierses; the war-making,
campaign-directing wantons of France, and Charles the Second’s scepter-
wielding drabs; but nowhere in the procession was my full-sized fellow
visible. I was a Unique; and glad to know that that fact could not be
dislodged or challenged for thirteen centuries and a half, for sure. Yes, in
power I was equal to the king. At the same time there was another power
that was a trifle stronger than both of us put together. That was the Church.
I do not wish to disguise that fact. I couldn’t, if I wanted to. But never mind
about that, now; it will show up, in its proper place, later on. It didn’t cause
me any trouble in the beginning—at least any of consequence.

Well, it was a curious country, and full of interest. And the people! They
were the quaintest and simplest and trustingest race; why, they were nothing
but rabbits. It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere
to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king
and Church and nobility; as if they had any more occasion to love and
honor king and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honor the
lash, or a dog has to love and honor the stranger that kicks him! Why, dear
me, any kind of royalty, howsoever modified, any kind of aristocracy,
howsoever pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you are born and brought up
under that sort of arrangement you probably never find it out for yourself,
and don’t believe it when somebody else tells you. It is enough to make a
body ashamed of his race to think of the sort of froth that has always
occupied its thrones without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate
people that have always figured as its aristocracies—a company of
monarchs and nobles who, as a rule, would have achieved only poverty and
obscurity if left, like their betters, to their own exertions.
The most of King Arthur’s British nation were slaves, pure and simple,
and bore that name, and wore the iron collar on their necks; and the rest
were slaves in fact, but without the name; they imagined themselves men
and freemen, and called themselves so. The truth was, the nation as a body
was in the world for one object, and one only: to grovel before king and
Church and noble; to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve that they
might be fed, work that they might play, drink misery to the dregs that they
might be happy, go naked that they might wear silks and jewels, pay taxes

that they might be spared from paying them, be familiar all their lives with
the degrading language and postures of adulation that they might walk in
pride and think themselves the gods of this world. And for all this, the
thanks they got were cuffs and contempt; and so poor-spirited were they
that they took even this sort of attention as an honor.

Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and
examine. I had mine, the king and his people had theirs. In both cases they
flowed in ruts worn deep by time and habit, and the man who should have
proposed to divert them by reason and argument would have had a long
contract on his hands. For instance, those people had inherited the idea that
all men without title and a long pedigree, whether they had great natural
gifts and acquirements or hadn’t, were creatures of no more consideration
than so many animals, bugs, insects; whereas I had inherited the idea that
human daws who can consent to masquerade in the peacock-shams of
inherited dignities and unearned titles, are of no good but to be laughed at.
The way I was looked upon was odd, but it was natural. You know how the
keeper and the public regard the elephant in the menagerie: well, that is the

idea. They are full of admiration of his vast bulk and his prodigious
strength; they speak with pride of the fact that he can do a hundred marvels
which are far and away beyond their own powers; and they speak with the
same pride of the fact that in his wrath he is able to drive a thousand men
before him. But does that make him one of them? No; the raggedest tramp
in the pit would smile at the idea. He couldn’t comprehend it; couldn’t take
it in; couldn’t in any remote way conceive of it. Well, to the king, the
nobles, and all the nation, down to the very slaves and tramps, I was just
that kind of an elephant, and nothing more. I was admired, also feared; but
it was as an animal is admired and feared. The animal is not reverenced,
neither was I; I was not even respected. I had no pedigree, no inherited title;
so in the king’s and nobles’ eyes I was mere dirt; the people regarded me
with wonder and awe, but there was no reverence mixed with it; through the
force of inherited ideas they were not able to conceive of anything being
entitled to that except pedigree and lordship. There you see the hand of that
awful power, the Roman Catholic Church. In two or three little centuries it
had converted a nation of men to a nation of worms. Before the day of the
Church’s supremacy in the world, men were men, and held their heads up,
and had a man’s pride and spirit and independence; and what of greatness
and position a person got, he got mainly by achievement, not by birth. But
then the Church came to the front, with an axe to grind; and she was wise,
subtle, and knew more than one way to skin a cat—or a nation; she invented
“divine right of kings,” and propped it all around, brick by brick, with the
Beatitudes—wrenching them from their good purpose to make them fortify
an evil one; she preached (to the commoner) humility, obedience to
superiors, the beauty of self-sacrifice; she preached (to the commoner)
meekness under insult; preached (still to the commoner, always to the
commoner) patience, meanness of spirit, non-resistance under oppression;
and she introduced heritable ranks and aristocracies, and taught all the
Christian populations of the earth to bow down to them and worship them.

Even down to my birth-century that poison was still in the blood of
Christendom, and the best of English commoners was still content to see his
inferiors impudently continuing to hold a number of positions, such as
lordships and the throne, to which the grotesque laws of his country did not
allow him to aspire; in fact, he was not merely contented with this strange
condition of things, he was even able to persuade himself that he was proud
of it. It seems to show that there isn’t anything you can’t stand, if you are
only born and bred to it. Of course that taint, that reverence for rank and
title, had been in our American blood, too—I know that; but when I left
America it had disappeared—at least to all intents and purposes. The
remnant of it was restricted to the dudes and dudesses. When a disease has
worked its way down to that level, it may fairly be said to be out of the
system.
But to return to my anomalous position in King Arthur’s kingdom. Here I
was, a giant among pigmies, a man among children, a master intelligence
among intellectual moles: by all rational measurement the one and only
actually great man in that whole British world; and yet there and then, just
as in the remote England of my birth-time, the sheep-witted earl who could
claim long descent from a king’s leman, acquired at second-hand from the
slums of London, was a better man than I was. Such a personage was
fawned upon in Arthur’s realm and reverently looked up to by everybody,
even though his dispositions were as mean as his intelligence, and his

morals as base as his lineage. There were times when he could sit down in
the king’s presence, but I couldn’t. I could have got a title easily enough,
and that would have raised me a large step in everybody’s eyes; even in the
king’s, the giver of it. But I didn’t ask for it; and I declined it when it was
offered. I couldn’t have enjoyed such a thing with my notions; and it
wouldn’t have been fair, anyway, because as far back as I could go, our
tribe had always been short of the bar sinister. I couldn’t have felt really and
satisfactorily fine and proud and set-up over any title except one that should
come from the nation itself, the only legitimate source; and such an one I
hoped to win; and in the course of years of honest and honorable endeavor,
I did win it and did wear it with a high and clean pride. This title fell
casually from the lips of a blacksmith, one day, in a village, was caught up
as a happy thought and tossed from mouth to mouth with a laugh and an
affirmative vote; in ten days it had swept the kingdom, and was become as
familiar as the king’s name. I was never known by any other designation
afterward, whether in the nation’s talk or in grave debate upon matters of
state at the council-board of the sovereign. This title, translated into modern
speech, would be THE BOSS. Elected by the nation. That suited me. And it
was a pretty high title. There were very few the’s, and I was one of them. If
you spoke of the duke, or the earl, or the bishop, how could anybody tell
which one you meant? But if you spoke of The King or The Queen or The
Boss, it was different.

Well, I liked the king, and as king I respected him—respected the office;
at least respected it as much as I was capable of respecting any unearned
supremacy; but as men I looked down upon him and his nobles—privately.
And he and they liked me, and respected my office; but as an animal,
without birth or sham title, they looked down upon me—and were not

particularly private about it, either. I didn’t charge for my opinion about
them, and they didn’t charge for their opinion about me: the account was
square, the books balanced, everybody was satisfied.

CHAPTER IX.
THE TOURNAMENT

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

good patent laws was just a crab, and couldn’t travel any way but sideways
or backways.
Things ran along, a tournament nearly every week; and now and then the
boys used to want me to take a hand—I mean Sir Launcelot and the rest—
but I said I would by and by; no hurry yet, and too much government
machinery to oil up and set to rights and start a-going.

We had one tournament which was continued from day to day during
more than a week, and as many as five hundred knights took part in it, from
first to last. They were weeks gathering. They came on horseback from
everywhere; from the very ends of the country, and even from beyond the
sea; and many brought ladies, and all brought squires and troops of
servants. It was a most gaudy and gorgeous crowd, as to costumery, and
very characteristic of the country and the time, in the way of high animal
spirits, innocent indecencies of language, and happy-hearted indifference to
morals. It was fight or look on, all day and every day; and sing, gamble,
dance, carouse half the night every night. They had a most noble good time.
You never saw such people. Those banks of beautiful ladies, shining in their
barbaric splendors, would see a knight sprawl from his horse in the lists
with a lanceshaft the thickness of your ankle clean through him and the
blood spouting, and instead of fainting they would clap their hands and
crowd each other for a better view; only sometimes one would dive into her
handkerchief, and look ostentatiously broken-hearted, and then you could

lay two to one that there was a scandal there somewhere and she was afraid
the public hadn’t found it out.
The noise at night would have been annoying to me ordinarily, but I
didn’t mind it in the present circumstances, because it kept me from hearing
the quacks detaching legs and arms from the day’s cripples. They ruined an
uncommon good old cross-cut saw for me, and broke the saw-buck, too, but
I let it pass. And as for my axe—well, I made up my mind that the next time
I lent an axe to a surgeon I would pick my century.
I not only watched this tournament from day to day, but detailed an
intelligent priest from my Department of Public Morals and Agriculture,
and ordered him to report it; for it was my purpose by and by, when I
should have gotten the people along far enough, to start a newspaper. The
first thing you want in a new country, is a patent office; then work up your
school system; and after that, out with your paper. A newspaper has its
faults, and plenty of them, but no matter, it’s hark from the tomb for a dead
nation, and don’t you forget it. You can’t resurrect a dead nation without it;
there isn’t any way. So I wanted to sample things, and be finding out what
sort of reporter-material I might be able to rake together out of the sixth
century when I should come to need it.

Well, the priest did very well, considering. He got in all the details, and
that is a good thing in a local item: you see, he had kept books for the
undertaker-department of his church when he was younger, and there, you
know, the money’s in the details; the more details, the more swag: bearers,
mutes, candles, prayers—everything counts; and if the bereaved don’t buy
prayers enough you mark up your candles with a forked pencil, and your
bill shows up all right. And he had a good knack at getting in the
complimentary thing here and there about a knight that was likely to
advertise—no, I mean a knight that had influence; and he also had a neat
gift of exaggeration, for in his time he had kept door for a pious hermit who
lived in a sty and worked miracles.
Of course this novice’s report lacked whoop and crash and lurid
description, and therefore wanted the true ring; but its antique wording was
quaint and sweet and simple, and full of the fragrances and flavors of the
time, and these little merits made up in a measure for its more important
lacks. Here is an extract from it:

Then Sir Brian de les Isles and Grummore Grummorsum,
knights of the castle, encountered with Sir Aglovale and Sir
Tor, and Sir Tor smote down Sir Grummore Grummorsum to
the earth. Then came Sir Carados of the dolorous tower, and
Sir Turquine, knights of the castle, and there encountered
with them Sir Percivale de Galis and Sir Lamorak de Galis,
that were two brethren, and there encountered Sir Percivale
with Sir Carados, and either brake their spears unto their
hands, and then Sir Turquine with Sir Lamorak, and either of
them smote down other, horse and all, to the earth, and
either parties rescued other and horsed them again. And Sir
Arnold, and Sir Gauter, knights of the castle, encountered
with Sir Brandiles and Sir Kay, and these four knights
encountered mightily, and brake their spears to their hands.
Then came Sir Pertolope from the castle, and there
encountered with him Sir Lionel, and there Sir Pertolope the
green knight smote down Sir Lionel, brother to Sir
Launcelot. All this was marked by noble heralds, who bare
him best, and their names. Then Sir Bleobaris brake his
spear upon Sir Gareth, but of that stroke Sir Bleobaris fell to

the earth. When Sir Galihodin saw that, he bad Sir Gareth
keep him, and Sir Gareth smote him to the earth. Then Sir
Galihud gat a spear to avenge his brother, and in the same
wise Sir Gareth served him, and Sir Dinadan and his brother
La Cote Male Taile, and Sir Sagramore le Disirous, and Sir
Dodinas le Savage; all these he bare down with one spear.
When King Aswisance of Ireland saw Sir Gareth fare so he
marvelled what he might be, that one time seemed green,
and another time, at his again coming, he seemed blue. And
thus at every course that he rode to and fro he changed his
color, so that there might neither king nor knight have ready
cognizance of him. Then Sir Agwisance the King of Ireland
encountered with Sir Gareth, and there Sir Gareth smote him
from his horse, saddle and all. And then came King Carados
of Scotland, and Sir Gareth smote him down horse and man.
And in the same wise he served King Uriens of the land of
Gore. And then there came in Sir Bagdemagus, and Sir
Gareth smote him down horse and man to the earth. And
Bagdemagus’s son Meliganus brake a spear upon Sir Gareth
mightily and knightly. And then Sir Galahault the noble
prince cried on high, Knight with the many colors, well hast
thou justed; now make thee ready that I may just with thee.
Sir Gareth heard him, and he gat a great spear, and so they
encountered together, and there the prince brake his spear;
but Sir Gareth smote him upon the left side of the helm, that
he reeled here and there, and he had fallen down had not his
men recovered him. Truly, said King Arthur, that knight with
the many colors is a good knight. Wherefore the king called
unto him Sir Launcelot, and prayed him to encounter with
that knight. Sir, said Launcelot, I may as well find in my
heart for to forbear him at this time, for he hath had travail
enough this day, and when a good knight doth so well upon
some day, it is no good knight’s part to let him of his
worship, and, namely, when he seeth a knight hath done so
great labour; for peradventure, said Sir Launcelot, his
quarrel is here this day, and peradventure he is best beloved
with this lady of all that be here, for I see well he paineth

himself and enforceth him to do great deeds, and therefore,
said Sir Launcelot, as for me, this day he shall have the
honour; though it lay in my power to put him from it, I
would not.

There was an unpleasant little episode that day, which for reasons of state
I struck out of my priest’s report. You will have noticed that Garry was
doing some great fighting in the engagement. When I say Garry I mean Sir
Gareth. Garry was my private pet name for him; it suggests that I had a
deep affection for him, and that was the case. But it was a private pet name
only, and never spoken aloud to any one, much less to him; being a noble,
he would not have endured a familiarity like that from me. Well, to proceed:
I sat in the private box set apart for me as the king’s minister. While Sir
Dinadan was waiting for his turn to enter the lists, he came in there and sat
down and began to talk; for he was always making up to me, because I was
a stranger and he liked to have a fresh market for his jokes, the most of
them having reached that stage of wear where the teller has to do the
laughing himself while the other person looks sick. I had always responded
to his efforts as well as I could, and felt a very deep and real kindness for
him, too, for the reason that if by malice of fate he knew the one particular
anecdote which I had heard oftenest and had most hated and most loathed
all my life, he had at least spared it me. It was one which I had heard
attributed to every humorous person who had ever stood on American soil,
from Columbus down to Artemus Ward. It was about a humorous lecturer
who flooded an ignorant audience with the killingest jokes for an hour and
never got a laugh; and then when he was leaving, some gray simpletons
wrung him gratefully by the hand and said it had been the funniest thing
they had ever heard, and “it was all they could do to keep from laughin’
right out in meetin’.” That anecdote never saw the day that it was worth the
telling; and yet I had sat under the telling of it hundreds and thousands and
millions and billions of times, and cried and cursed all the way through.
Then who can hope to know what my feelings were, to hear this armor-
plated ass start in on it again, in the murky twilight of tradition, before the
dawn of history, while even Lactantius might be referred to as “the late
Lactantius,” and the Crusades wouldn’t be born for five hundred years yet?
Just as he finished, the call-boy came; so, haw-hawing like a demon, he
went rattling and clanking out like a crate of loose castings, and I knew

nothing more. It was some minutes before I came to, and then I opened my
eyes just in time to see Sir Gareth fetch him an awful welt, and I
unconsciously out with the prayer, “I hope to gracious he’s killed!” But by
ill-luck, before I had got half through with the words, Sir Gareth crashed
into Sir Sagramor le Desirous and sent him thundering over his horse’s
crupper, and Sir Sagramor caught my remark and thought I meant it for him.

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

CHAPTER X.
BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION

The Round Table soon heard of the challenge, and of course it was a
good deal discussed, for such things interested the boys. The king thought I
ought now to set forth in quest of adventures, so that I might gain renown
and be the more worthy to meet Sir Sagramor when the several years should
have rolled away. I excused myself for the present; I said it would take me
three or four years yet to get things well fixed up and going smoothly; then
I should be ready; all the chances were that at the end of that time Sir
Sagramor would still be out grailing, so no valuable time would be lost by
the postponement; I should then have been in office six or seven years, and

I believed my system and machinery would be so well developed that I
could take a holiday without its working any harm.
I was pretty well satisfied with what I had already accomplished. In
various quiet nooks and corners I had the beginnings of all sorts of
industries under way—nuclei of future vast factories, the iron and steel
missionaries of my future civilization. In these were gathered together the
brightest young minds I could find, and I kept agents out raking the country
for more, all the time. I was training a crowd of ignorant folk into experts—
experts in every sort of handiwork and scientific calling. These nurseries of
mine went smoothly and privately along undisturbed in their obscure
country retreats, for nobody was allowed to come into their precincts
without a special permit—for I was afraid of the Church.
I had started a teacher-factory and a lot of Sunday-schools the first thing;
as a result, I now had an admirable system of graded schools in full blast in
those places, and also a complete variety of Protestant congregations all in a
prosperous and growing condition. Everybody could be any kind of a
Christian he wanted to; there was perfect freedom in that matter. But I
confined public religious teaching to the churches and the Sunday-schools,
permitting nothing of it in my other educational buildings. I could have
given my own sect the preference and made everybody a Presbyterian
without any trouble, but that would have been to affront a law of human
nature: spiritual wants and instincts are as various in the human family as
are physical appetites, complexions, and features, and a man is only at his
best, morally, when he is equipped with the religious garment whose color
and shape and size most nicely accommodate themselves to the spiritual
complexion, angularities, and stature of the individual who wears it; and,
besides, I was afraid of a united Church; it makes a mighty power, the
mightiest conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into selfish hands, as
it is always bound to do, it means death to human liberty and paralysis to
human thought.
All mines were royal property, and there were a good many of them.
They had formerly been worked as savages always work mines—holes
grubbed in the earth and the mineral brought up in sacks of hide by hand, at
the rate of a ton a day; but I had begun to put the mining on a scientific
basis as early as I could.

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

Four years rolled by—and then! Well, you would never imagine it in the
world. Unlimited power is the ideal thing when it is in safe hands. The
despotism of heaven is the one absolutely perfect government. An earthly
despotism would be the absolutely perfect earthly government, if the
conditions were the same, namely, the despot the perfectest individual of
the human race, and his lease of life perpetual. But as a perishable perfect
man must die, and leave his despotism in the hands of an imperfect
successor, an earthly despotism is not merely a bad form of government, it
is the worst form that is possible.
My works showed what a despot could do with the resources of a
kingdom at his command. Unsuspected by this dark land, I had the
civilization of the nineteenth century booming under its very nose! It was
fenced away from the public view, but there it was, a gigantic and
unassailable fact—and to be heard from, yet, if I lived and had luck. There
it was, as sure a fact and as substantial a fact as any serene volcano,
standing innocent with its smokeless summit in the blue sky and giving no
sign of the rising hell in its bowels. My schools and churches were children
four years before; they were grown-up now; my shops of that day were vast

factories now; where I had a dozen trained men then, I had a thousand now;
where I had one brilliant expert then, I had fifty now. I stood with my hand
on the cock, so to speak, ready to turn it on and flood the midnight world
with light at any moment. But I was not going to do the thing in that sudden
way. It was not my policy. The people could not have stood it; and,
moreover, I should have had the Established Roman Catholic Church on my
back in a minute.
No, I had been going cautiously all the while. I had had confidential
agents trickling through the country some time, whose office was to
undermine knighthood by imperceptible degrees, and to gnaw a little at this
and that and the other superstition, and so prepare the way gradually for a
better order of things. I was turning on my light one-candle-power at a time,
and meant to continue to do so.
I had scattered some branch schools secretly about the kingdom, and they
were doing very well. I meant to work this racket more and more, as time
wore on, if nothing occurred to frighten me. One of my deepest secrets was
my West Point—my military academy. I kept that most jealously out of
sight; and I did the same with my naval academy which I had established at
a remote seaport. Both were prospering to my satisfaction.

Clarence was twenty-two now, and was my head executive, my right
hand. He was a darling; he was equal to anything; there wasn’t anything he
couldn’t turn his hand to. Of late I had been training him for journalism, for

the time seemed about right for a start in the newspaper line; nothing big,
but just a small weekly for experimental circulation in my civilization-
nurseries. He took to it like a duck; there was an editor concealed in him,
sure. Already he had doubled himself in one way; he talked sixth century
and wrote nineteenth. His journalistic style was climbing, steadily; it was
already up to the back settlement Alabama mark, and couldn’t be told from
the editorial output of that region either by matter or flavor.
We had another large departure on hand, too. This was a telegraph and a
telephone; our first venture in this line. These wires were for private service
only, as yet, and must be kept private until a riper day should come. We had
a gang of men on the road, working mainly by night. They were stringing
ground wires; we were afraid to put up poles, for they would attract too
much inquiry. Ground wires were good enough, in both instances, for my
wires were protected by an insulation of my own invention which was
perfect. My men had orders to strike across country, avoiding roads, and
establishing connection with any considerable towns whose lights betrayed
their presence, and leaving experts in charge. Nobody could tell you how to
find any place in the kingdom, for nobody ever went intentionally to any
place, but only struck it by accident in his wanderings, and then generally
left it without thinking to inquire what its name was. At one time and
another we had sent out topographical expeditions to survey and map the
kingdom, but the priests had always interfered and raised trouble. So we
had given the thing up, for the present; it would be poor wisdom to
antagonize the Church.

As for the general condition of the country, it was as it had been when I
arrived in it, to all intents and purposes. I had made changes, but they were
necessarily slight, and they were not noticeable. Thus far, I had not even
meddled with taxation, outside of the taxes which provided the royal
revenues. I had systematized those, and put the service on an effective and
righteous basis. As a result, these revenues were already quadrupled, and
yet the burden was so much more equably distributed than before, that all
the kingdom felt a sense of relief, and the praises of my administration were
hearty and general.
Personally, I struck an interruption, now, but I did not mind it, it could
not have happened at a better time. Earlier it could have annoyed me, but
now everything was in good hands and swimming right along. The king had
reminded me several times, of late, that the postponement I had asked for,
four years before, had about run out now. It was a hint that I ought to be
starting out to seek adventures and get up a reputation of a size to make me
worthy of the honor of breaking a lance with Sir Sagramor, who was still
out grailing, but was being hunted for by various relief expeditions, and
might be found any year, now. So you see I was expecting this interruption;
it did not take me by surprise.

CHAPTER XI.
THE YANKEE IN SEARCH OF ADVENTURES

There never was such a country for wandering liars; and they were of
both sexes. Hardly a month went by without one of these tramps arriving;
and generally loaded with a tale about some princess or other wanting help
to get her out of some far-away castle where she was held in captivity by a
lawless scoundrel, usually a giant. Now you would think that the first thing
the king would do after listening to such a novelette from an entire stranger,
would be to ask for credentials—yes, and a pointer or two as to locality of
castle, best route to it, and so on. But nobody ever thought of so simple and
common-sense a thing at that. No, everybody swallowed these people’s lies
whole, and never asked a question of any sort or about anything. Well, one

day when I was not around, one of these people came along—it was a she
one, this time—and told a tale of the usual pattern. Her mistress was a
captive in a vast and gloomy castle, along with forty-four other young and
beautiful girls, pretty much all of them princesses; they had been
languishing in that cruel captivity for twenty-six years; the masters of the
castle were three stupendous brothers, each with four arms and one eye—
the eye in the center of the forehead, and as big as a fruit. Sort of fruit not
mentioned; their usual slovenliness in statistics.

Would you believe it? The king and the whole Round Table were in
raptures over this preposterous opportunity for adventure. Every knight of
the Table jumped for the chance, and begged for it; but to their vexation and
chagrin the king conferred it upon me, who had not asked for it at all.
By an effort, I contained my joy when Clarence brought me the news.
But he—he could not contain his. His mouth gushed delight and gratitude in
a steady discharge—delight in my good fortune, gratitude to the king for
this splendid mark of his favor for me. He could keep neither his legs nor
his body still, but pirouetted about the place in an airy ecstasy of happiness.
On my side, I could have cursed the kindness that conferred upon me this
benefaction, but I kept my vexation under the surface for policy’s sake, and
did what I could to let on to be glad. Indeed, I said I was glad. And in a way
it was true; I was as glad as a person is when he is scalped.

Well, one must make the best of things, and not waste time with useless
fretting, but get down to business and see what can be done. In all lies there
is wheat among the chaff; I must get at the wheat in this case: so I sent for
the girl and she came. She was a comely enough creature, and soft and
modest, but, if signs went for anything, she didn’t know as much as a lady’s
watch. I said:
“My dear, have you been questioned as to particulars?”
She said she hadn’t.
“Well, I didn’t expect you had, but I thought I would ask, to make sure;
it’s the way I’ve been raised. Now you mustn’t take it unkindly if I remind
you that as we don’t know you, we must go a little slow. You may be all
right, of course, and we’ll hope that you are; but to take it for granted isn’t
business. You understand that. I’m obliged to ask you a few questions; just
answer up fair and square, and don’t be afraid. Where do you live, when
you are at home?”
“In the land of Moder, fair sir.”
“Land of Moder. I don’t remember hearing of it before. Parents living?”
“As to that, I know not if they be yet on live, sith it is many years that I
have lain shut up in the castle.”
“Your name, please?”
“I hight the Demoiselle Alisande la Carteloise, an it please you.”
“Do you know anybody here who can identify you?”
“That were not likely, fair lord, I being come hither now for the first
time.”
“Have you brought any letters—any documents—any proofs that you are
trustworthy and truthful?”
“Of a surety, no; and wherefore should I? Have I not a tongue, and
cannot I say all that myself?”
“But your saying it, you know, and somebody else’s saying it, is
different.”
“Different? How might that be? I fear me I do not understand.”
“Don’t understand? Land of—why, you see—you see—why, great Scott,
can’t you understand a little thing like that? Can’t you understand the
difference between your—why do you look so innocent and idiotic!”

“I? In truth I know not, but an it were the will of God.”
“Yes, yes, I reckon that’s about the size of it. Don’t mind my seeming
excited; I’m not. Let us change the subject. Now as to this castle, with
forty-five princesses in it, and three ogres at the head of it, tell me—where
is this harem?”
“Harem?”
“The castle, you understand; where is the castle?”
“Oh, as to that, it is great, and strong, and well beseen, and lieth in a far
country. Yes, it is many leagues.”
“How many?”
“Ah, fair sir, it were woundily hard to tell, they are so many, and do so
lap the one upon the other, and being made all in the same image and
tincted with the same color, one may not know the one league from its
fellow, nor how to count them except they be taken apart, and ye wit well it
were God’s work to do that, being not within man’s capacity; for ye will
note—”

“Hold on, hold on, never mind about the distance; whereabouts does the
castle lie? What’s the direction from here?”
“Ah, please you sir, it hath no direction from here; by reason that the road
lieth not straight, but turneth evermore; wherefore the direction of its place
abideth not, but is some time under the one sky and anon under another,
whereso if ye be minded that it is in the east, and wend thitherward, ye shall
observe that the way of the road doth yet again turn upon itself by the space
of half a circle, and this marvel happing again and yet again and still again,
it will grieve you that you had thought by vanities of the mind to thwart and
bring to naught the will of Him that giveth not a castle a direction from a
place except it pleaseth Him, and if it please Him not, will the rather that
even all castles and all directions thereunto vanish out of the earth, leaving
the places wherein they tarried desolate and vacant, so warning His
creatures that where He will He will, and where He will not He—”
“Oh, that’s all right, that’s all right, give us a rest; never mind about the
direction, hang the direction—I beg pardon, I beg a thousand pardons, I am
not well to-day; pay no attention when I soliloquize, it is an old habit, an
old, bad habit, and hard to get rid of when one’s digestion is all disordered
with eating food that was raised forever and ever before he was born; good
land! a man can’t keep his functions regular on spring chickens thirteen
hundred years old. But come—never mind about that; let’s—have you got
such a thing as a map of that region about you? Now a good map—”
“Is it peradventure that manner of thing which of late the unbelievers
have brought from over the great seas, which, being boiled in oil, and an
onion and salt added thereto, doth—”
“What, a map? What are you talking about? Don’t you know what a map
is? There, there, never mind, don’t explain, I hate explanations; they fog a
thing up so that you can’t tell anything about it. Run along, dear; good-day;
show her the way, Clarence.”
Oh, well, it was reasonably plain, now, why these donkeys didn’t
prospect these liars for details. It may be that this girl had a fact in her
somewhere, but I don’t believe you could have sluiced it out with a
hydraulic; nor got it with the earlier forms of blasting, even; it was a case
for dynamite. Why, she was a perfect ass; and yet the king and his knights
had listened to her as if she had been a leaf out of the gospel. It kind of sizes
up the whole party. And think of the simple ways of this court: this

wandering wench hadn’t any more trouble to get access to the king in his
palace than she would have had to get into the poorhouse in my day and
country. In fact, he was glad to see her, glad to hear her tale; with that
adventure of hers to offer, she was as welcome as a corpse is to a coroner.
Just as I was ending-up these reflections, Clarence came back. I remarked
upon the barren result of my efforts with the girl; hadn’t got hold of a single
point that could help me to find the castle. The youth looked a little
surprised, or puzzled, or something, and intimated that he had been
wondering to himself what I had wanted to ask the girl all those questions
for.
“Why, great guns,” I said, “don’t I want to find the castle? And how else
would I go about it?”
“La, sweet your worship, one may lightly answer that, I ween. She will
go with thee. They always do. She will ride with thee.”
“Ride with me? Nonsense!”
“But of a truth she will. She will ride with thee. Thou shalt see.”
“What? She browse around the hills and scour the woods with me—alone
—and I as good as engaged to be married? Why, it’s scandalous. Think how
it would look.”
My, the dear face that rose before me! The boy was eager to know all
about this tender matter. I swore him to secrecy and then whispered her
name—“Puss Flanagan.” He looked disappointed, and said he didn’t
remember the countess. How natural it was for the little courtier to give her
a rank. He asked me where she lived.
“In East Har—” I came to myself and stopped, a little confused; then I
said, “Never mind, now; I’ll tell you some time.”
And might he see her? Would I let him see her some day?
It was but a little thing to promise—thirteen hundred years or so—and he
so eager; so I said Yes. But I sighed; I couldn’t help it. And yet there was no
sense in sighing, for she wasn’t born yet. But that is the way we are made:
we don’t reason, where we feel; we just feel.
My expedition was all the talk that day and that night, and the boys were
very good to me, and made much of me, and seemed to have forgotten their
vexation and disappointment, and come to be as anxious for me to hive
those ogres and set those ripe old virgins loose as if it were themselves that

had the contract. Well, they were good children—but just children, that is
all. And they gave me no end of points about how to scout for giants, and
how to scoop them in; and they told me all sorts of charms against
enchantments, and gave me salves and other rubbish to put on my wounds.
But it never occurred to one of them to reflect that if I was such a wonderful
necromancer as I was pretending to be, I ought not to need salves or
instructions, or charms against enchantments, and, least of all, arms and
armor, on a foray of any kind—even against fire-spouting dragons, and
devils hot from perdition, let alone such poor adversaries as these I was
after, these commonplace ogres of the back settlements.
I was to have an early breakfast, and start at dawn, for that was the usual
way; but I had the demon’s own time with my armor, and this delayed me a
little. It is troublesome to get into, and there is so much detail. First you
wrap a layer or two of blanket around your body, for a sort of cushion and
to keep off the cold iron; then you put on your sleeves and shirt of chain
mail—these are made of small steel links woven together, and they form a
fabric so flexible that if you toss your shirt onto the floor, it slumps into a
pile like a peck of wet fish-net; it is very heavy and is nearly the
uncomfortablest material in the world for a night shirt, yet plenty used it for
that—tax collectors, and reformers, and one-horse kings with a defective
title, and those sorts of people; then you put on your shoes—flat-boats
roofed over with interleaving bands of steel—and screw your clumsy spurs
into the heels. Next you buckle your greaves on your legs, and your cuisses
on your thighs; then come your backplate and your breastplate, and you
begin to feel crowded; then you hitch onto the breastplate the half-petticoat
of broad overlapping bands of steel which hangs down in front but is
scolloped out behind so you can sit down, and isn’t any real improvement
on an inverted coal scuttle, either for looks or for wear, or to wipe your
hands on; next you belt on your sword; then you put your stove-pipe joints
onto your arms, your iron gauntlets onto your hands, your iron rat-trap onto
your head, with a rag of steel web hitched onto it to hang over the back of
your neck—and there you are, snug as a candle in a candle-mould. This is
no time to dance. Well, a man that is packed away like that is a nut that isn’t
worth the cracking, there is so little of the meat, when you get down to it,
by comparison with the shell.
The boys helped me, or I never could have got in. Just as we finished, Sir
Bedivere happened in, and I saw that as like as not I hadn’t chosen the most

convenient outfit for a long trip. How stately he looked; and tall and broad
and grand. He had on his head a conical steel casque that only came down
to his ears, and for visor had only a narrow steel bar that extended down to
his upper lip and protected his nose; and all the rest of him, from neck to
heel, was flexible chain mail, trousers and all. But pretty much all of him
was hidden under his outside garment, which of course was of chain mail,
as I said, and hung straight from his shoulders to his ankles; and from his
middle to the bottom, both before and behind, was divided, so that he could
ride and let the skirts hang down on each side. He was going grailing, and it
was just the outfit for it, too. I would have given a good deal for that ulster,
but it was too late now to be fooling around. The sun was just up, the king
and the court were all on hand to see me off and wish me luck; so it
wouldn’t be etiquette for me to tarry. You don’t get on your horse yourself;
no, if you tried it you would get disappointed. They carry you out, just as
they carry a sun-struck man to the drug store, and put you on, and help get
you to rights, and fix your feet in the stirrups; and all the while you do feel
so strange and stuffy and like somebody else—like somebody that has been
married on a sudden, or struck by lightning, or something like that, and
hasn’t quite fetched around yet, and is sort of numb, and can’t just get his
bearings. Then they stood up the mast they called a spear, in its socket by
my left foot, and I gripped it with my hand; lastly they hung my shield
around my neck, and I was all complete and ready to up anchor and get to
sea. Everybody was as good to me as they could be, and a maid of honor
gave me the stirrup-cup her own self. There was nothing more to do now,
but for that damsel to get up behind me on a pillion, which she did, and put
an arm or so around me to hold on.

And so we started, and everybody gave us a goodbye and waved their
handkerchiefs or helmets. And everybody we met, going down the hill and
through the village was respectful to us, except some shabby little boys on
the outskirts. They said:
“Oh, what a guy!” And hove clods at us.
In my experience boys are the same in all ages. They don’t respect
anything, they don’t care for anything or anybody. They say “Go up,
baldhead” to the prophet going his unoffending way in the gray of antiquity;
they sass me in the holy gloom of the Middle Ages; and I had seen them act
the same way in Buchanan’s administration; I remember, because I was
there and helped. The prophet had his bears and settled with his boys; and I
wanted to get down and settle with mine, but it wouldn’t answer, because I
couldn’t have got up again. I hate a country without a derrick.

CHAPTER XII.
SLOW TORTURE

Straight off, we were in the country. It was most lovely and pleasant in
those sylvan solitudes in the early cool morning in the first freshness of
autumn. From hilltops we saw fair green valleys lying spread out below,
with streams winding through them, and island groves of trees here and
there, and huge lonely oaks scattered about and casting black blots of shade;
and beyond the valleys we saw the ranges of hills, blue with haze,
stretching away in billowy perspective to the horizon, with at wide intervals
a dim fleck of white or gray on a wave-summit, which we knew was a
castle. We crossed broad natural lawns sparkling with dew, and we moved
like spirits, the cushioned turf giving out no sound of footfall; we dreamed

along through glades in a mist of green light that got its tint from the sun-
drenched roof of leaves overhead, and by our feet the clearest and coldest of
runlets went frisking and gossiping over its reefs and making a sort of
whispering music, comfortable to hear; and at times we left the world
behind and entered into the solemn great deeps and rich gloom of the forest,
where furtive wild things whisked and scurried by and were gone before
you could even get your eye on the place where the noise was; and where
only the earliest birds were turning out and getting to business with a song
here and a quarrel yonder and a mysterious far-off hammering and
drumming for worms on a tree trunk away somewhere in the impenetrable
remotenesses of the woods. And by and by out we would swing again into
the glare.

About the third or fourth or fifth time that we swung out into the glare—
it was along there somewhere, a couple of hours or so after sun-up—it
wasn’t as pleasant as it had been. It was beginning to get hot. This was quite
noticeable. We had a very long pull, after that, without any shade. Now it is
curious how progressively little frets grow and multiply after they once get
a start. Things which I didn’t mind at all, at first, I began to mind now—and
more and more, too, all the time. The first ten or fifteen times I wanted my
handkerchief I didn’t seem to care; I got along, and said never mind, it isn’t
any matter, and dropped it out of my mind. But now it was different; I
wanted it all the time; it was nag, nag, nag, right along, and no rest; I
couldn’t get it out of my mind; and so at last I lost my temper and said hang
a man that would make a suit of armor without any pockets in it. You see I
had my handkerchief in my helmet; and some other things; but it was that
kind of a helmet that you can’t take off by yourself. That hadn’t occurred to
me when I put it there; and in fact I didn’t know it. I supposed it would be

particularly convenient there. And so now, the thought of its being there, so
handy and close by, and yet not get-at-able, made it all the worse and the
harder to bear. Yes, the thing that you can’t get is the thing that you want,
mainly; every one has noticed that. Well, it took my mind off from
everything else; took it clear off, and centered it in my helmet; and mile
after mile, there it stayed, imagining the handkerchief, picturing the
handkerchief; and it was bitter and aggravating to have the salt sweat keep
trickling down into my eyes, and I couldn’t get at it. It seems like a little
thing, on paper, but it was not a little thing at all; it was the most real kind
of misery. I would not say it if it was not so. I made up my mind that I
would carry along a reticule next time, let it look how it might, and people
say what they would. Of course these iron dudes of the Round Table would
think it was scandalous, and maybe raise Sheol about it, but as for me, give
me comfort first, and style afterwards. So we jogged along, and now and
then we struck a stretch of dust, and it would tumble up in clouds and get
into my nose and make me sneeze and cry; and of course I said things I
oughtn’t to have said, I don’t deny that. I am not better than others.
We couldn’t seem to meet anybody in this lonesome Britain, not even an
ogre; and, in the mood I was in then, it was well for the ogre; that is, an
ogre with a handkerchief. Most knights would have thought of nothing but
getting his armor; but so I got his bandanna, he could keep his hardware, for
all of me.
Meantime, it was getting hotter and hotter in there. You see, the sun was
beating down and warming up the iron more and more all the time. Well,
when you are hot, that way, every little thing irritates you. When I trotted, I
rattled like a crate of dishes, and that annoyed me; and moreover I couldn’t
seem to stand that shield slatting and banging, now about my breast, now
around my back; and if I dropped into a walk my joints creaked and
screeched in that wearisome way that a wheelbarrow does, and as we didn’t
create any breeze at that gait, I was like to get fried in that stove; and
besides, the quieter you went the heavier the iron settled down on you and
the more and more tons you seemed to weigh every minute. And you had to
be always changing hands, and passing your spear over to the other foot, it
got so irksome for one hand to hold it long at a time.

Well, you know, when you perspire that way, in rivers, there comes a
time when you—when you—well, when you itch. You are inside, your
hands are outside; so there you are; nothing but iron between. It is not a
light thing, let it sound as it may. First it is one place; then another; then
some more; and it goes on spreading and spreading, and at last the territory
is all occupied, and nobody can imagine what you feel like, nor how
unpleasant it is. And when it had got to the worst, and it seemed to me that I
could not stand anything more, a fly got in through the bars and settled on
my nose, and the bars were stuck and wouldn’t work, and I couldn’t get the
visor up; and I could only shake my head, which was baking hot by this
time, and the fly—well, you know how a fly acts when he has got a
certainty—he only minded the shaking enough to change from nose to lip,
and lip to ear, and buzz and buzz all around in there, and keep on lighting
and biting, in a way that a person, already so distressed as I was, simply
could not stand. So I gave in, and got Alisande to unship the helmet and

relieve me of it. Then she emptied the conveniences out of it and fetched it
full of water, and I drank and then stood up, and she poured the rest down
inside the armor. One cannot think how refreshing it was. She continued to
fetch and pour until I was well soaked and thoroughly comfortable.

It was good to have a rest—and peace. But nothing is quite perfect in this
life, at any time. I had made a pipe a while back, and also some pretty fair
tobacco; not the real thing, but what some of the Indians use: the inside bark
of the willow, dried. These comforts had been in the helmet, and now I had
them again, but no matches.
Gradually, as the time wore along, one annoying fact was borne in upon
my understanding—that we were weather-bound. An armed novice cannot
mount his horse without help and plenty of it. Sandy was not enough; not
enough for me, anyway. We had to wait until somebody should come along.
Waiting, in silence, would have been agreeable enough, for I was full of
matter for reflection, and wanted to give it a chance to work. I wanted to try
and think out how it was that rational or even half-rational men could ever
have learned to wear armor, considering its inconveniences; and how they

had managed to keep up such a fashion for generations when it was plain
that what I had suffered to-day they had had to suffer all the days of their
lives. I wanted to think that out; and moreover I wanted to think out some
way to reform this evil and persuade the people to let the foolish fashion die
out; but thinking was out of the question in the circumstances. You couldn’t
think, where Sandy was.
She was a quite biddable creature and good-hearted, but she had a flow
of talk that was as steady as a mill, and made your head sore like the drays
and wagons in a city. If she had had a cork she would have been a comfort.
But you can’t cork that kind; they would die. Her clack was going all day,
and you would think something would surely happen to her works, by and
by; but no, they never got out of order; and she never had to slack up for
words. She could grind, and pump, and churn, and buzz by the week, and
never stop to oil up or blow out. And yet the result was just nothing but
wind. She never had any ideas, any more than a fog has. She was a perfect
blatherskite; I mean for jaw, jaw, jaw, talk, talk, talk, jabber, jabber, jabber;
but just as good as she could be. I hadn’t minded her mill that morning, on
account of having that hornets’ nest of other troubles; but more than once in
the afternoon I had to say:
“Take a rest, child; the way you are using up all the domestic air, the
kingdom will have to go to importing it by to-morrow, and it’s a low
enough treasury without that.”

CHAPTER XIII.
FREEMEN

Yes, it is strange how little a while at a time a person can be contented.
Only a little while back, when I was riding and suffering, what a heaven this
peace, this rest, this sweet serenity in this secluded shady nook by this
purling stream would have seemed, where I could keep perfectly
comfortable all the time by pouring a dipper of water into my armor now
and then; yet already I was getting dissatisfied; partly because I could not
light my pipe—for, although I had long ago started a match factory, I had
forgotten to bring matches with me—and partly because we had nothing to
eat. Here was another illustration of the childlike improvidence of this age
and people. A man in armor always trusted to chance for his food on a
journey, and would have been scandalized at the idea of hanging a basket of

sandwiches on his spear. There was probably not a knight of all the Round
Table combination who would not rather have died than been caught
carrying such a thing as that on his flagstaff. And yet there could not be
anything more sensible. It had been my intention to smuggle a couple of
sandwiches into my helmet, but I was interrupted in the act, and had to
make an excuse and lay them aside, and a dog got them.
Night approached, and with it a storm. The darkness came on fast. We
must camp, of course. I found a good shelter for the demoiselle under a
rock, and went off and found another for myself. But I was obliged to
remain in my armor, because I could not get it off by myself and yet could
not allow Alisande to help, because it would have seemed so like
undressing before folk. It would not have amounted to that in reality,
because I had clothes on underneath; but the prejudices of one’s breeding
are not gotten rid of just at a jump, and I knew that when it came to
stripping off that bob-tailed iron petticoat I should be embarrassed.
With the storm came a change of weather; and the stronger the wind
blew, and the wilder the rain lashed around, the colder and colder it got.
Pretty soon, various kinds of bugs and ants and worms and things began to
flock in out of the wet and crawl down inside my armor to get warm; and
while some of them behaved well enough, and snuggled up amongst my
clothes and got quiet, the majority were of a restless, uncomfortable sort,
and never stayed still, but went on prowling and hunting for they did not
know what; especially the ants, which went tickling along in wearisome
procession from one end of me to the other by the hour, and are a kind of
creatures which I never wish to sleep with again. It would be my advice to
persons situated in this way, to not roll or thrash around, because this
excites the interest of all the different sorts of animals and makes every last
one of them want to turn out and see what is going on, and this makes
things worse than they were before, and of course makes you objurgate
harder, too, if you can. Still, if one did not roll and thrash around he would
die; so perhaps it is as well to do one way as the other; there is no real
choice. Even after I was frozen solid I could still distinguish that tickling,
just as a corpse does when he is taking electric treatment. I said I would
never wear armor after this trip.
All those trying hours whilst I was frozen and yet was in a living fire, as
you may say, on account of that swarm of crawlers, that same unanswerable

question kept circling and circling through my tired head: How do people
stand this miserable armor? How have they managed to stand it all these
generations? How can they sleep at night for dreading the tortures of next
day?
When the morning came at last, I was in a bad enough plight: seedy,
drowsy, fagged, from want of sleep; weary from thrashing around, famished
from long fasting; pining for a bath, and to get rid of the animals; and
crippled with rheumatism. And how had it fared with the nobly born, the
titled aristocrat, the Demoiselle Alisande la Carteloise? Why, she was as
fresh as a squirrel; she had slept like the dead; and as for a bath, probably
neither she nor any other noble in the land had ever had one, and so she was
not missing it. Measured by modern standards, they were merely modified
savages, those people. This noble lady showed no impatience to get to
breakfast—and that smacks of the savage, too. On their journeys those
Britons were used to long fasts, and knew how to bear them; and also how
to freight up against probable fasts before starting, after the style of the
Indian and the anaconda. As like as not, Sandy was loaded for a three-day
stretch.
We were off before sunrise, Sandy riding and I limping along behind. In
half an hour we came upon a group of ragged poor creatures who had
assembled to mend the thing which was regarded as a road. They were as
humble as animals to me; and when I proposed to breakfast with them, they
were so flattered, so overwhelmed by this extraordinary condescension of
mine that at first they were not able to believe that I was in earnest. My lady
put up her scornful lip and withdrew to one side; she said in their hearing
that she would as soon think of eating with the other cattle—a remark
which embarrassed these poor devils merely because it referred to them,
and not because it insulted or offended them, for it didn’t. And yet they
were not slaves, not chattels. By a sarcasm of law and phrase they were
freemen. Seven-tenths of the free population of the country were of just
their class and degree: small “independent” farmers, artisans, etc.; which is
to say, they were the nation, the actual Nation; they were about all of it that
was useful, or worth saving, or really respect-worthy, and to subtract them
would have been to subtract the Nation and leave behind some dregs, some
refuse, in the shape of a king, nobility and gentry, idle, unproductive,
acquainted mainly with the arts of wasting and destroying, and of no sort of
use or value in any rationally constructed world.

And yet, by ingenious contrivance, this gilded minority, instead of being
in the tail of the procession where it belonged, was marching head up and
banners flying, at the other end of it; had elected itself to be the Nation, and
these innumerable clams had permitted it so long that they had come at last
to accept it as a truth; and not only that, but to believe it right and as it
should be. The priests had told their fathers and themselves that this ironical
state of things was ordained of God; and so, not reflecting upon how unlike
God it would be to amuse himself with sarcasms, and especially such poor
transparent ones as this, they had dropped the matter there and become
respectfully quiet.

The talk of these meek people had a strange enough sound in a formerly
American ear. They were freemen, but they could not leave the estates of
their lord or their bishop without his permission; they could not prepare
their own bread, but must have their corn ground and their bread baked at
his mill and his bakery, and pay roundly for the same; they could not sell a
piece of their own property without paying him a handsome percentage of

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

And here were these freemen assembled in the early morning to work on
their lord the bishop’s road three days each—gratis; every head of a family,
and every son of a family, three days each, gratis, and a day or so added for
their servants. Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before
the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years
of such villany away in one swift tidal-wave of blood—one: a settlement of
that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead
of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary
stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which
was not to be mated but in hell. There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we
would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot
passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the
other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand
persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the
“horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas,
what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death
from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by
lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery
could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been
so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly
contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably
bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its
vastness or pity as it deserves.
These poor ostensible freemen who were sharing their breakfast and their
talk with me, were as full of humble reverence for their king and Church
and nobility as their worst enemy could desire. There was something
pitifully ludicrous about it. I asked them if they supposed a nation of people
ever existed, who, with a free vote in every man’s hand, would elect that a
single family and its descendants should reign over it forever, whether
gifted or boobies, to the exclusion of all other families—including the
voter’s; and would also elect that a certain hundred families should be
raised to dizzy summits of rank, and clothed on with offensive transmissible
glories and privileges to the exclusion of the rest of the nation’s families—
including his own.
They all looked unhit, and said they didn’t know; that they had never
thought about it before, and it hadn’t ever occurred to them that a nation
could be so situated that every man could have a say in the government. I

said I had seen one—and that it would last until it had an Established
Church. Again they were all unhit—at first. But presently one man looked
up and asked me to state that proposition again; and state it slowly, so it
could soak into his understanding. I did it; and after a little he had the idea,
and he brought his fist down and said he didn’t believe a nation where every
man had a vote would voluntarily get down in the mud and dirt in any such
way; and that to steal from a nation its will and preference must be a crime
and the first of all crimes. I said to myself:
“This one’s a man. If I were backed by enough of his sort, I would make
a strike for the welfare of this country, and try to prove myself its loyalest
citizen by making a wholesome change in its system of government.”
You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its
institutions or its office-holders. The country is the real thing, the
substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for,
and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and
clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to
protect the body from winter, disease, and death. To be loyal to rags, to
shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags—that is a loyalty of
unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by
monarchy; let monarchy keep it. I was from Connecticut, whose
Constitution declares “that all political power is inherent in the people, and
all free governments are founded on their authority and instituted for their
benefit; and that they have at all times an undeniable and indefeasible right
to alter their form of government in such a manner as they may think
expedient.”

Under that gospel, the citizen who thinks he sees that the
commonwealth’s political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and
does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor. That he may be the
only one who thinks he sees this decay, does not excuse him; it is his duty
to agitate anyway, and it is the duty of the others to vote him down if they
do not see the matter as he does.
And now here I was, in a country where a right to say how the country
should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its
population. For the nine hundred and ninety-four to express dissatisfaction
with the regnant system and propose to change it, would have made the
whole six shudder as one man, it would have been so disloyal, so
dishonorable, such putrid black treason. So to speak, I was become a
stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the
members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six
elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all the
dividends. It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four
dupes needed was a new deal. The thing that would have best suited the
circus side of my nature would have been to resign the Boss-ship and get up
an insurrection and turn it into a revolution; but I knew that the Jack Cade
or the Wat Tyler who tries such a thing without first educating his materials

up to revolution grade is almost absolutely certain to get left. I had never
been accustomed to getting left, even if I do say it myself. Wherefore, the
“deal” which had been for some time working into shape in my mind was
of a quite different pattern from the Cade-Tyler sort.
So I did not talk blood and insurrection to that man there who sat
munching black bread with that abused and mistaught herd of human sheep,
but took him aside and talked matter of another sort to him. After I had
finished, I got him to lend me a little ink from his veins; and with this and a
sliver I wrote on a piece of bark—

Put him in the Man-factory—

and gave it to him, and said:
“Take it to the palace at Camelot and give it into the hands of Amyas le
Poulet, whom I call Clarence, and he will understand.”
“He is a priest, then,” said the man, and some of the enthusiasm went out
of his face.
“How—a priest? Didn’t I tell you that no chattel of the Church, no bond-
slave of pope or bishop can enter my Man-Factory? Didn’t I tell you that
you couldn’t enter unless your religion, whatever it might be, was your own
free property?”
“Marry, it is so, and for that I was glad; wherefore it liked me not, and
bred in me a cold doubt, to hear of this priest being there.”
“But he isn’t a priest, I tell you.”
The man looked far from satisfied. He said:
“He is not a priest, and yet can read?”
“He is not a priest and yet can read—yes, and write, too, for that matter. I
taught him myself.” The man’s face cleared. “And it is the first thing that
you yourself will be taught in that Factory—”
“I? I would give blood out of my heart to know that art. Why, I will be
your slave, your—”
“No you won’t, you won’t be anybody’s slave. Take your family and go
along. Your lord the bishop will confiscate your small property, but no
matter. Clarence will fix you all right.”

CHAPTER XIV.
“DEFEND THEE, LORD”

I paid three pennies for my breakfast, and a most extravagant price it
was, too, seeing that one could have breakfasted a dozen persons for that
money; but I was feeling good by this time, and I had always been a kind of
spendthrift anyway; and then these people had wanted to give me the food
for nothing, scant as their provision was, and so it was a grateful pleasure to
emphasize my appreciation and sincere thankfulness with a good big
financial lift where the money would do so much more good than it would
in my helmet, where, these pennies being made of iron and not stinted in
weight, my half-dollar’s worth was a good deal of a burden to me. I spent
money rather too freely in those days, it is true; but one reason for it was
that I hadn’t got the proportions of things entirely adjusted, even yet, after

so long a sojourn in Britain—hadn’t got along to where I was able to
absolutely realize that a penny in Arthur’s land and a couple of dollars in
Connecticut were about one and the same thing: just twins, as you may say,
in purchasing power. If my start from Camelot could have been delayed a
very few days I could have paid these people in beautiful new coins from
our own mint, and that would have pleased me; and them, too, not less. I
had adopted the American values exclusively. In a week or two now, cents,
nickels, dimes, quarters, and half-dollars, and also a trifle of gold, would be
trickling in thin but steady streams all through the commercial veins of the
kingdom, and I looked to see this new blood freshen up its life.
The farmers were bound to throw in something, to sort of offset my
liberality, whether I would or no; so I let them give me a flint and steel; and
as soon as they had comfortably bestowed Sandy and me on our horse, I lit
my pipe. When the first blast of smoke shot out through the bars of my
helmet, all those people broke for the woods, and Sandy went over
backwards and struck the ground with a dull thud. They thought I was one
of those fire-belching dragons they had heard so much about from knights
and other professional liars. I had infinite trouble to persuade those people
to venture back within explaining distance. Then I told them that this was
only a bit of enchantment which would work harm to none but my enemies.
And I promised, with my hand on my heart, that if all who felt no enmity
toward me would come forward and pass before me they should see that
only those who remained behind would be struck dead. The procession
moved with a good deal of promptness. There were no casualties to report,
for nobody had curiosity enough to remain behind to see what would
happen.

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

We tarried with a holy hermit, that night, and my opportunity came about
the middle of the next afternoon. We were crossing a vast meadow by way
of short-cut, and I was musing absently, hearing nothing, seeing nothing,
when Sandy suddenly interrupted a remark which she had begun that
morning, with the cry:
“Defend thee, lord!—peril of life is toward!”

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

But these people stopped, two or three hundred yards away, and this
troubled me. My satisfaction collapsed, and fear came; I judged I was a lost
man. But Sandy was radiant; and was going to be eloquent—but I stopped
her, and told her my magic had miscarried, somehow or other, and she must
mount, with all despatch, and we must ride for life. No, she wouldn’t. She
said that my enchantment had disabled those knights; they were not riding
on, because they couldn’t; wait, they would drop out of their saddles
presently, and we would get their horses and harness. I could not deceive
such trusting simplicity, so I said it was a mistake; that when my fireworks
killed at all, they killed instantly; no, the men would not die, there was
something wrong about my apparatus, I couldn’t tell what; but we must
hurry and get away, for those people would attack us again, in a minute.
Sandy laughed, and said:
“Lack-a-day, sir, they be not of that breed! Sir Launcelot will give battle
to dragons, and will abide by them, and will assail them again, and yet
again, and still again, until he do conquer and destroy them; and so likewise
will Sir Pellinore and Sir Aglovale and Sir Carados, and mayhap others, but

there be none else that will venture it, let the idle say what the idle will.
And, la, as to yonder base rufflers, think ye they have not their fill, but yet
desire more?”
“Well, then, what are they waiting for? Why don’t they leave? Nobody’s
hindering. Good land, I’m willing to let bygones be bygones, I’m sure.”
“Leave, is it? Oh, give thyself easement as to that. They dream not of it,
no, not they. They wait to yield them.”
“Come—really, is that ‘sooth’—as you people say? If they want to, why
don’t they?”
“It would like them much; but an ye wot how dragons are esteemed, ye
would not hold them blamable. They fear to come.”
“Well, then, suppose I go to them instead, and—”
“Ah, wit ye well they would not abide your coming. I will go.”
And she did. She was a handy person to have along on a raid. I would
have considered this a doubtful errand, myself. I presently saw the knights
riding away, and Sandy coming back. That was a relief. I judged she had
somehow failed to get the first innings—I mean in the conversation;
otherwise the interview wouldn’t have been so short. But it turned out that
she had managed the business well; in fact, admirably. She said that when
she told those people I was The Boss, it hit them where they lived: “smote
them sore with fear and dread” was her word; and then they were ready to
put up with anything she might require. So she swore them to appear at
Arthur’s court within two days and yield them, with horse and harness, and
be my knights henceforth, and subject to my command. How much better
she managed that thing than I should have done it myself! She was a daisy.

CHAPTER XV.
SANDY’S TALE

“And so I’m proprietor of some knights,” said I, as we rode off. “Who
would ever have supposed that I should live to list up assets of that sort. I
shan’t know what to do with them; unless I raffle them off. How many of
them are there, Sandy?”
“Seven, please you, sir, and their squires.”
“It is a good haul. Who are they? Where do they hang out?”
“Where do they hang out?”
“Yes, where do they live?”
“Ah, I understood thee not. That will I tell eftsoons.” Then she said
musingly, and softly, turning the words daintily over her tongue: “Hang

they out—hang they out—where hang—where do they hang out; eh, right
so; where do they hang out. Of a truth the phrase hath a fair and winsome
grace, and is prettily worded withal. I will repeat it anon and anon in mine
idlesse, whereby I may peradventure learn it. Where do they hang out. Even
so! already it falleth trippingly from my tongue, and forasmuch as—”
“Don’t forget the cowboys, Sandy.”
“Cowboys?”
“Yes; the knights, you know: You were going to tell me about them. A
while back, you remember. Figuratively speaking, game’s called.”
“Game—”
“Yes, yes, yes! Go to the bat. I mean, get to work on your statistics, and
don’t burn so much kindling getting your fire started. Tell me about the
knights.”
“I will well, and lightly will begin. So they two departed and rode into a
great forest. And—”
“Great Scott!”
You see, I recognized my mistake at once. I had set her works a-going; it
was my own fault; she would be thirty days getting down to those facts.
And she generally began without a preface and finished without a result. If
you interrupted her she would either go right along without noticing, or
answer with a couple of words, and go back and say the sentence over
again. So, interruptions only did harm; and yet I had to interrupt, and
interrupt pretty frequently, too, in order to save my life; a person would die
if he let her monotony drip on him right along all day.
“Great Scott!” I said in my distress. She went right back and began over
again:
“So they two departed and rode into a great forest. And—”
“Which two?”
“Sir Gawaine and Sir Uwaine. And so they came to an abbey of monks,
and there were well lodged. So on the morn they heard their masses in the
abbey, and so they rode forth till they came to a great forest; then was Sir
Gawaine ware in a valley by a turret, of twelve fair damsels, and two
knights armed on great horses, and the damsels went to and fro by a tree.
And then was Sir Gawaine ware how there hung a white shield on that tree,

and ever as the damsels came by it they spit upon it, and some threw mire
upon the shield—”

“Now, if I hadn’t seen the like myself in this country, Sandy, I wouldn’t
believe it. But I’ve seen it, and I can just see those creatures now, parading
before that shield and acting like that. The women here do certainly act like
all possessed. Yes, and I mean your best, too, society’s very choicest brands.
The humblest hello-girl along ten thousand miles of wire could teach
gentleness, patience, modesty, manners, to the highest duchess in Arthur’s
land.”
“Hello-girl?”
“Yes, but don’t you ask me to explain; it’s a new kind of a girl; they don’t
have them here; one often speaks sharply to them when they are not the
least in fault, and he can’t get over feeling sorry for it and ashamed of
himself in thirteen hundred years, it’s such shabby mean conduct and so
unprovoked; the fact is, no gentleman ever does it—though I—well, I
myself, if I’ve got to confess—”
“Peradventure she—”
“Never mind her; never mind her; I tell you I couldn’t ever explain her so
you would understand.”

“Even so be it, sith ye are so minded. Then Sir Gawaine and Sir Uwaine
went and saluted them, and asked them why they did that despite to the
shield. Sirs, said the damsels, we shall tell you. There is a knight in this
country that owneth this white shield, and he is a passing good man of his
hands, but he hateth all ladies and gentlewomen, and therefore we do all
this despite to the shield. I will say you, said Sir Gawaine, it beseemeth evil
a good knight to despise all ladies and gentlewomen, and peradventure
though he hate you he hath some cause, and peradventure he loveth in some
other places ladies and gentlewomen, and to be loved again, and he such a
man of prowess as ye speak of—”
“Man of prowess—yes, that is the man to please them, Sandy. Man of
brains—that is a thing they never think of. Tom Sayers—John Heenan—
John L. Sullivan—pity but you could be here. You would have your legs
under the Round Table and a ‘Sir’ in front of your names within the twenty-
four hours; and you could bring about a new distribution of the married
princesses and duchesses of the Court in another twenty-four. The fact is, it
is just a sort of polished-up court of Comanches, and there isn’t a squaw in
it who doesn’t stand ready at the dropping of a hat to desert to the buck with
the biggest string of scalps at his belt.”
“—and he be such a man of prowess as ye speak of, said Sir Gawaine.
Now, what is his name? Sir, said they, his name is Marhaus the king’s son
of Ireland.”
“Son of the king of Ireland, you mean; the other form doesn’t mean
anything. And look out and hold on tight, now, we must jump this gully....
There, we are all right now. This horse belongs in the circus; he is born
before his time.”

“I know him well, said Sir Uwaine, he is a passing good knight as any is
on live.”
“On live. If you’ve got a fault in the world, Sandy, it is that you are a
shade too archaic. But it isn’t any matter.”
“—for I saw him once proved at a justs where many knights were
gathered, and that time there might no man withstand him. Ah, said Sir
Gawaine, damsels, methinketh ye are to blame, for it is to suppose he that
hung that shield there will not be long therefrom, and then may those
knights match him on horseback, and that is more your worship than thus;
for I will abide no longer to see a knight’s shield dishonored. And therewith
Sir Uwaine and Sir Gawaine departed a little from them, and then were they
ware where Sir Marhaus came riding on a great horse straight toward them.
And when the twelve damsels saw Sir Marhaus they fled into the turret as
they were wild, so that some of them fell by the way. Then the one of the
knights of the tower dressed his shield, and said on high, Sir Marhaus
defend thee. And so they ran together that the knight brake his spear on
Marhaus, and Sir Marhaus smote him so hard that he brake his neck and the
horse’s back—”

“Well, that is just the trouble about this state of things, it ruins so many
horses.”
“That saw the other knight of the turret, and dressed him toward
Marhaus, and they went so eagerly together, that the knight of the turret was
soon smitten down, horse and man, stark dead—”
“Another horse gone; I tell you it is a custom that ought to be broken up.
I don’t see how people with any feeling can applaud and support it.”

“So these two knights came together with great random—”
I saw that I had been asleep and missed a chapter, but I didn’t say
anything. I judged that the Irish knight was in trouble with the visitors by
this time, and this turned out to be the case.
“—that Sir Uwaine smote Sir Marhaus that his spear brast in pieces on
the shield, and Sir Marhaus smote him so sore that horse and man he bare to
the earth, and hurt Sir Uwaine on the left side—”
“The truth is, Alisande, these archaics are a little too simple; the
vocabulary is too limited, and so, by consequence, descriptions suffer in the
matter of variety; they run too much to level Saharas of fact, and not
enough to picturesque detail; this throws about them a certain air of the
monotonous; in fact the fights are all alike: a couple of people come
together with great random—random is a good word, and so is exegesis, for
that matter, and so is holocaust, and defalcation, and usufruct and a hundred
others, but land! a body ought to discriminate—they come together with
great random, and a spear is brast, and one party brake his shield and the
other one goes down, horse and man, over his horse-tail and brake his neck,
and then the next candidate comes randoming in, and brast his spear, and
the other man brast his shield, and down he goes, horse and man, over his
horse-tail, and brake his neck, and then there’s another elected, and another
and another and still another, till the material is all used up; and when you
come to figure up results, you can’t tell one fight from another, nor who
whipped; and as a picture, of living, raging, roaring battle, sho! why, it’s
pale and noiseless—just ghosts scuffling in a fog. Dear me, what would this
barren vocabulary get out of the mightiest spectacle?—the burning of Rome

in Nero’s time, for instance? Why, it would merely say, ‘Town burned
down; no insurance; boy brast a window, fireman brake his neck!’ Why,
that ain’t a picture!”

It was a good deal of a lecture, I thought, but it didn’t disturb Sandy,
didn’t turn a feather; her steam soared steadily up again, the minute I took
off the lid:
“Then Sir Marhaus turned his horse and rode toward Gawaine with his
spear. And when Sir Gawaine saw that, he dressed his shield, and they
aventred their spears, and they came together with all the might of their
horses, that either knight smote other so hard in the midst of their shields,
but Sir Gawaine’s spear brake—”
“I knew it would.”
—“but Sir Marhaus’s spear held; and therewith Sir Gawaine and his
horse rushed down to the earth—”
“Just so—and brake his back.”
—“and lightly Sir Gawaine rose upon his feet and pulled out his sword,
and dressed him toward Sir Marhaus on foot, and therewith either came
unto other eagerly, and smote together with their swords, that their shields
flew in cantels, and they bruised their helms and their hauberks, and
wounded either other. But Sir Gawaine, fro it passed nine of the clock,
waxed by the space of three hours ever stronger and stronger and thrice his
might was increased. All this espied Sir Marhaus, and had great wonder
how his might increased, and so they wounded other passing sore; and then
when it was come noon—”
The pelting sing-song of it carried me forward to scenes and sounds of
my boyhood days:
“N-e-e-ew Haven! ten minutes for refreshments—knductr’ll strike the
gong-bell two minutes before train leaves—passengers for the Shore-line
please take seats in the rear k’yar, this k’yar don’t go no furder—ahh -pls,
aw -rnjz, b’nan ners, s-a-n-d’ches, p—op-corn!”
—“and waxed past noon and drew toward evensong. Sir Gawaine’s
strength feebled and waxed passing faint, that unnethes he might dure any
longer, and Sir Marhaus was then bigger and bigger—”
“Which strained his armor, of course; and yet little would one of these
people mind a small thing like that.”
—“and so, Sir Knight, said Sir Marhaus, I have well felt that ye are a
passing good knight, and a marvelous man of might as ever I felt any, while
it lasteth, and our quarrels are not great, and therefore it were a pity to do

you hurt, for I feel you are passing feeble. Ah, said Sir Gawaine, gentle
knight, ye say the word that I should say. And therewith they took off their
helms and either kissed other, and there they swore together either to love
other as brethren—”
But I lost the thread there, and dozed off to slumber, thinking about what
a pity it was that men with such superb strength—strength enabling them to
stand up cased in cruelly burdensome iron and drenched with perspiration,
and hack and batter and bang each other for six hours on a stretch—should
not have been born at a time when they could put it to some useful purpose.
Take a jackass, for instance: a jackass has that kind of strength, and puts it
to a useful purpose, and is valuable to this world because he is a jackass;
but a nobleman is not valuable because he is a jackass. It is a mixture that is
always ineffectual, and should never have been attempted in the first place.
And yet, once you start a mistake, the trouble is done and you never know
what is going to come of it.
When I came to myself again and began to listen, I perceived that I had
lost another chapter, and that Alisande had wandered a long way off with
her people.
“And so they rode and came into a deep valley full of stones, and thereby
they saw a fair stream of water; above thereby was the head of the stream, a
fair fountain, and three damsels sitting thereby. In this country, said Sir
Marhaus, came never knight since it was christened, but he found strange
adventures—”
“This is not good form, Alisande. Sir Marhaus the king’s son of Ireland
talks like all the rest; you ought to give him a brogue, or at least a
characteristic expletive; by this means one would recognize him as soon as
he spoke, without his ever being named. It is a common literary device with
the great authors. You should make him say, ‘In this country, be jabers,
came never knight since it was christened, but he found strange adventures,
be jabers.’ You see how much better that sounds.”
—“came never knight but he found strange adventures, be jabers. Of a
truth it doth indeed, fair lord, albeit ’tis passing hard to say, though
peradventure that will not tarry but better speed with usage. And then they
rode to the damsels, and either saluted other, and the eldest had a garland of
gold about her head, and she was threescore winter of age or more—”
“The damsel was?”

“Even so, dear lord—and her hair was white under the garland—”
“Celluloid teeth, nine dollars a set, as like as not—the loose-fit kind, that
go up and down like a portcullis when you eat, and fall out when you
laugh.”
“The second damsel was of thirty winter of age, with a circlet of gold
about her head. The third damsel was but fifteen year of age—”
Billows of thought came rolling over my soul, and the voice faded out of
my hearing!
Fifteen! Break—my heart! oh, my lost darling! Just her age who was so
gentle, and lovely, and all the world to me, and whom I shall never see
again! How the thought of her carries me back over wide seas of memory to
a vague dim time, a happy time, so many, many centuries hence, when I
used to wake in the soft summer mornings, out of sweet dreams of her, and
say “Hello, Central!” just to hear her dear voice come melting back to me
with a “Hello, Hank!” that was music of the spheres to my enchanted ear.
She got three dollars a week, but she was worth it.
I could not follow Alisande’s further explanation of who our captured
knights were, now—I mean in case she should ever get to explaining who
they were. My interest was gone, my thoughts were far away, and sad. By
fitful glimpses of the drifting tale, caught here and there and now and then,
I merely noted in a vague way that each of these three knights took one of
these three damsels up behind him on his horse, and one rode north, another
east, the other south, to seek adventures, and meet again and lie, after year
and day. Year and day—and without baggage. It was of a piece with the
general simplicity of the country.
The sun was now setting. It was about three in the afternoon when
Alisande had begun to tell me who the cowboys were; so she had made
pretty good progress with it—for her. She would arrive some time or other,
no doubt, but she was not a person who could be hurried.

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

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 distance 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 bulletin-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 Established 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
missionary’s next move was to get the family together and try it on himself;
he was to stop at no experiment, however 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 believed 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 disseminate 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 anywhere 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
Washington 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
railings 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 afterward 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 personality 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 misrepresented, 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 confidence, 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 nevertheless 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 Catholic 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
persons; below the salt sat minor officers of the household, 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 unimaginable 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 happened 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
chaplain 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
quarrelsomely, some dead and under the table. Of the ladies, the worst
spectacle was a lovely young duchess, 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 expectation 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 another
inspiration. I said:
“Do what you choose.”
She was up and facing toward the queen in a moment. 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 person 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 statesman 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 composed and serene, when
the cords all down my legs were hurting in sympathy with that man’s pain.
Conducted by mailed guards bearing flaring torches, we tramped along
echoing corridors, and down stone stairways 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
suspicious. 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
representative, and was speaking in his name. She saw she had to yield. I
asked her to indorse me to these people, 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, lovingly, 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 otherwise.”
“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
dullest 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 without 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
distressing 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 Established 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 an
Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is
nursed, cradled, preserved 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 sudden 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 extenuating 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 remarking 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 discreditable 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 unprofitably 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 deserved 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 something 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 expense, as far as the
law was concerned, but reprisals in kind were to be expected. Any body
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
murdered somebody who belonged up among the ornamental 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
dismemberment 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 prodding 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 prisoners. 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, believing 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 astonished at this strange treatment, and
implacably embittered 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, kenneled 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
curiosity; 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
disrespectful 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! Indeed, 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 fellows 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
distance. 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 mourners, 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 condition 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 funerals 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 incarceration 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 repeated 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 oppression was what He loved to
see in parties of a subordinate 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 incarceration 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—nothing more, nothing less. Well, when we inherit
property, 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 photograph 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 morning, 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! I 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 consequences. 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
Marhaus. And they kneeled all down and put the pommels 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 Whitsuntide 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 nonsense
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 corners 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 battered 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, meseemeth—”
“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
nooning 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
distinction 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 clutching 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 than
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 account. 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 afternoon we came upon one of those very
patriarchs ourselves, 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 stagnant. 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
generation 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 account 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 encounter who was planning out a peaceful
revolution in his mind. For it could not help bringing up the unget-
aroundable fact that, all gentle cant and philosophizing 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. Presently, 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
perception it is enchanted and dight in a base and shameful 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 banners 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 particular 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 annoying
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 blisters 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 gasometer.

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 anything. 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 enchantments;
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
Connecticut 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 support 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 performance. 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 overmastering 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 unexpectedness; 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 promenaded; 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 observance; 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 miraculous waters and be cleansed 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 unceasingly 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
monastery 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 multitudes 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 agreeable 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 account 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 procession 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 husbands, 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 consciousness 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 gladness 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 instead. 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 shrieking 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
familiarity 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 pilgrims 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 husband 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 heartstrings 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 saddle 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 common?”
“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 whereof
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,
Laboratory 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 constructions 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 possessed 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 emergency 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 reputation, 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 community 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 questionable 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 temporary 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 a 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, anyway; 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 hundred and fifty feet deep, and there was forty-
one feet of water in it. I called in a monk and asked:
“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 testimony goeth, brought
down to us through our predecessors.”
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 brotherhood, 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 difficulty 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 Wednesday. 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 sentences 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 exactly 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 renowned 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 minutes 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
thousand 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 boulder 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 forehatch and the
running-gear clewed up with a featherstitch 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 personal 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 occult 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 wounds, 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 necessarily 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. Whenever 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
conditions. We took possession of the well and its surroundings. My boys
were experts in all sorts of things, from the stoning up of a well to the
constructing 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 fireworks 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 determined to spring the miracle before
midnight, for business 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, performance 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 evening 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 beyond 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 pronounced this ghastly
word with a kind of awfulness which caused hundreds to tremble, and many
women to faint:
“Constantinopolitanischerdudelsackspfeifenmachersgesellschafft!”
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:
“Nihilistendynamittheaterkaestchenssprengungsattentaetsversuchungen!”

—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:
“Transvaaltruppentropentransporttrampelthiertreibertrauungsthraenentrag
oedie!”
—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:
“Mekkamuselmannenmassenmenchenmoerdermohrenmuttermarmormon
umentenmacher!”
—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 pronounce the dread name and
command the spell to dissolve. You want to brace up, and take hold of
something.” 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 understand 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 uncovered 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 glorying over it.

CHAPTER XXIV.
A RIVAL MAGICIAN

My influence in the Valley of Holiness was something 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 suggested 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 remaining. 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
innocent 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
rheumatism 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 everybody 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 hermitage 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?—Behold, thou mayst glad thy heart
an thou hast faith to believe the wonderful when that it cometh in
unexpected 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 myself. 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 suffocation. 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 Academy 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 therefore 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 consequence. 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 destructive. 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 enchanter.
“Most gladly, yea, and gratefully.”
Everybody was full of awe and interest again right away, the incorrigible
idiots. They watched the incantations 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 refreshment 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 before 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 enchanter 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
cutting 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 procession; 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 examination 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 excursion for the king, he kept some of his business
functions 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 feeling. They are the result of
the same cause in both cases: the possessor’s old and inbred custom of
regarding himself as a superior being. The king’s judgments 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 particular 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 Mansion 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 conveniency, eligible to the exercise of his said right,
and thus would she have kept all she had. Whereas, failing 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 roadsides 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 aristocracy, no doubt. Men write many fine and
plausible arguments in support of monarchy, but the fact remains 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 supposed 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 nobody 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 professors.
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 department; 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 candidate 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 details 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
understand—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 knowledge.”
“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 delivery, 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 increment, 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
desolation wrought.”
“What do you know of the laws of attraction and gravitation?”
“If there be such, mayhap his grace the king did promulgate 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 emendations
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 before 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 wonderful. In the one case a man
lies dead-alive four generations—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 College.”
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 command, 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 charitable, 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
conferred 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 materials, 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 Pendragon 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. Because 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 persuaded 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 ventured 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 grandees should be always
addressed by a stunningly gaudy and awe-compelling title (which I would
presently invent), 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
permanent 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 adventure 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,

anyway, 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. Conspicuous, 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 watering 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 generally 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 likeness 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 precisely the same—
each paid $6. Nothing could be equaler than that, I reckon. Well, Scotland

and Ireland were tributary to Arthur, and the united populations of the
British Islands amounted to something less than 1,000,000. 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 substitution 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 examined 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 occurrence—a picture which you would think
it dangerous for a sick person to approach; whereas, on the contrary,
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 believe 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:

—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 out-
lying smithies. See his ad.

Of course it was good enough journalism for a beginning; I knew that
quite well, and yet it was somehow disappointing. The “Court Circular”
pleased me better; indeed, its simple and dignified respectfulness 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 repetitiousness of fact under variety of
form: skin your fact each time and lay on a new cuticle of words. It
deceives 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:

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 construction 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 questions: 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 suspected 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 protective prayer or two.
“Ah-h—a miracle, a wonder! Dark work of enchantment.”
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 astonished
and reverent ejaculations all through: “Ah-h-h!” “How true!” “Amazing,
amazing!” “These be the very haps as they happened, in marvelous

exactness!” 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,
handling 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 speaking 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 universe 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 contentment.
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 unattractive. 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—provisions 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 roadside, 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 followed, 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 inconvenient, 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 planning, 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 atmosphere 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 profession. 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 foretell 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 take 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 forgotten 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 Mississippi; 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 explain 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 subject, 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 humbug
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 getting 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—everything’s right! And yet the fact remains,
the aggregate’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
spiritlessness is wanting; that’s what’s the trouble. It’s all amateur—

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 monument, 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 correcting. 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 representing 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 intellectual 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, transmissible 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 harvested 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 gratitude! 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 peacefuler 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
something 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 bearing 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 ancestors 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 nothing 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 heartbreak. 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 anything, 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, wherefore 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 protect 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 neglect; 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
disease, 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 gathered the stiffening form to her sheltering arms.
She had recognized the death-rattle.

CHAPTER XXX.
THE TRAGEDY OF THE MANOR-HOUSE

At midnight all was over, and we sat in the presence of four corpses. We
covered them with such rags as we could find, and started away, fastening
the door behind us. Their home must be these people’s grave, for they could
not have Christian burial, or be admitted to consecrated ground. They were
as dogs, wild beasts, lepers, and no soul that valued its hope of eternal life
would throw it away by meddling in any sort with these rebuked and
smitten outcasts.
We had not moved four steps when I caught a sound as of footsteps upon
gravel. My heart flew to my throat. We must not be seen coming from that

house. I plucked at the king’s robe and we drew back and took shelter
behind the corner of the cabin.
“Now we are safe,” I said, “but it was a close call—so to speak. If the
night had been lighter he might have seen us, no doubt, he seemed to be so
near.”
“Mayhap it is but a beast and not a man at all.”
“True. But man or beast, it will be wise to stay here a minute and let it
get by and out of the way.”
“Hark! It cometh hither.”
True again. The step was coming toward us—straight toward the hut. It
must be a beast, then, and we might as well have saved our trepidation. I
was going to step out, but the king laid his hand upon my arm. There was a
moment of silence, then we heard a soft knock on the cabin door. It made
me shiver. Presently the knock was repeated, and then we heard these words
in a guarded voice:
“Mother! Father! Open—we have got free, and we bring news to pale
your cheeks but glad your hearts; and we may not tarry, but must fly! And
—but they answer not. Mother! father!—”
I drew the king toward the other end of the hut and whispered:
“Come—now we can get to the road.”
The king hesitated, was going to demur; but just then we heard the door
give way, and knew that those desolate men were in the presence of their
dead.
“Come, my liege! in a moment they will strike a light, and then will
follow that which it would break your heart to hear.”
He did not hesitate this time. The moment we were in the road I ran; and
after a moment he threw dignity aside and followed. I did not want to think
of what was happening in the hut—I couldn’t bear it; I wanted to drive it
out of my mind; so I struck into the first subject that lay under that one in
my mind:
“I have had the disease those people died of, and so have nothing to fear;
but if you have not had it also—”
He broke in upon me to say he was in trouble, and it was his conscience
that was troubling him:

“These young men have got free, they say—but how? It is not likely that
their lord hath set them free.”
“Oh, no, I make no doubt they escaped.”
“That is my trouble; I have a fear that this is so, and your suspicion doth
confirm it, you having the same fear.”
“I should not call it by that name though. I do suspect that they escaped,
but if they did, I am not sorry, certainly.”
“I am not sorry, I think—but—”
“What is it? What is there for one to be troubled about?”
“If they did escape, then are we bound in duty to lay hands upon them
and deliver them again to their lord; for it is not seemly that one of his
quality should suffer a so insolent and high-handed outrage from persons of
their base degree.”
There it was again. He could see only one side of it. He was born so,
educated so, his veins were full of ancestral blood that was rotten with this
sort of unconscious brutality, brought down by inheritance from a long
procession of hearts that had each done its share toward poisoning the
stream. To imprison these men without proof, and starve their kindred, was
no harm, for they were merely peasants and subject to the will and pleasure
of their lord, no matter what fearful form it might take; but for these men to
break out of unjust captivity was insult and outrage, and a thing not to be
countenanced by any conscientious person who knew his duty to his sacred
caste.
I worked more than half an hour before I got him to change the subject—
and even then an outside matter did it for me. This was a something which
caught our eyes as we struck the summit of a small hill—a red glow, a good
way off.
“That’s a fire,” said I.
Fires interested me considerably, because I was getting a good deal of an
insurance business started, and was also training some horses and building
some steam fire-engines, with an eye to a paid fire department by and by.
The priests opposed both my fire and life insurance, on the ground that it
was an insolent attempt to hinder the decrees of God; and if you pointed out
that they did not hinder the decrees in the least, but only modified the hard
consequences of them if you took out policies and had luck, they retorted

that that was gambling against the decrees of God, and was just as bad. So
they managed to damage those industries more or less, but I got even on my
accident business. As a rule, a knight is a lummux, and some times even a
labrick, and hence open to pretty poor arguments when they come glibly
from a superstition-monger, but even he could see the practical side of a
thing once in a while; and so of late you couldn’t clean up a tournament and
pile the result without finding one of my accident-tickets in every helmet.

We stood there awhile, in the thick darkness and stillness, looking toward
the red blur in the distance, and trying to make out the meaning of a far-
away murmur that rose and fell fitfully on the night. Sometimes it swelled
up and for a moment seemed less remote; but when we were hopefully
expecting it to betray its cause and nature, it dulled and sank again, carrying
its mystery with it. We started down the hill in its direction, and the winding
road plunged us at once into almost solid darkness—darkness that was
packed and crammed in between two tall forest walls. We groped along
down for half a mile, perhaps, that murmur growing more and more distinct
all the time. The coming storm threatening more and more, with now and
then a little shiver of wind, a faint show of lightning, and dull grumblings of
distant thunder. I was in the lead. I ran against something—a soft heavy
something which gave, slightly, to the impulse of my weight; at the same
moment the lightning glared out, and within a foot of my face was the
writhing face of a man who was hanging from the limb of a tree! That is, it
seemed to be writhing, but it was not. It was a grewsome sight. Straightway
there was an ear-splitting explosion of thunder, and the bottom of heaven
fell out; the rain poured down in a deluge. No matter, we must try to cut this

man down, on the chance that there might be life in him yet, mustn’t we?
The lightning came quick and sharp now, and the place was alternately
noonday and midnight. One moment the man would be hanging before me
in an intense light, and the next he was blotted out again in the darkness. I
told the king we must cut him down. The king at once objected.
“If he hanged himself, he was willing to lose his property to his lord; so
let him be. If others hanged him, belike they had the right—let him hang.”
“But—”
“But me no buts, but even leave him as he is. And for yet another reason.
When the lightning cometh again—there, look abroad.”
Two others hanging, within fifty yards of us!
“It is not weather meet for doing useless courtesies unto dead folk. They
are past thanking you. Come—it is unprofitable to tarry here.”
There was reason in what he said, so we moved on. Within the next mile
we counted six more hanging forms by the blaze of the lightning, and
altogether it was a grisly excursion. That murmur was a murmur no longer,
it was a roar; a roar of men’s voices. A man came flying by now, dimly
through the darkness, and other men chasing him. They disappeared.
Presently another case of the kind occurred, and then another and another.
Then a sudden turn of the road brought us in sight of that fire—it was a
large manor-house, and little or nothing was left of it—and everywhere men
were flying and other men raging after them in pursuit.
I warned the king that this was not a safe place for strangers. We would
better get away from the light, until matters should improve. We stepped
back a little, and hid in the edge of the wood. From this hiding-place we
saw both men and women hunted by the mob. The fearful work went on
until nearly dawn. Then, the fire being out and the storm spent, the voices
and flying footsteps presently ceased, and darkness and stillness reigned
again.
We ventured out, and hurried cautiously away; and although we were
worn out and sleepy, we kept on until we had put this place some miles
behind us. Then we asked hospitality at the hut of a charcoal burner, and got
what was to be had. A woman was up and about, but the man was still
asleep, on a straw shake-down, on the clay floor. The woman seemed
uneasy until I explained that we were travelers and had lost our way and

been wandering in the woods all night. She became talkative, then, and
asked if we had heard of the terrible goings-on at the manor-house of
Abblasoure. Yes, we had heard of them, but what we wanted now was rest
and sleep. The king broke in:
“Sell us the house and take yourselves away, for we be perilous company,
being late come from people that died of the Spotted Death.”
It was good of him, but unnecessary. One of the commonest decorations
of the nation was the waffle-iron face. I had early noticed that the woman
and her husband were both so decorated. She made us entirely welcome,
and had no fears; and plainly she was immensely impressed by the king’s
proposition; for, of course, it was a good deal of an event in her life to run
across a person of the king’s humble appearance who was ready to buy a
man’s house for the sake of a night’s lodging. It gave her a large respect for
us, and she strained the lean possibilities of her hovel to the utmost to make
us comfortable.
We slept till far into the afternoon, and then got up hungry enough to
make cotter fare quite palatable to the king, the more particularly as it was
scant in quantity. And also in variety; it consisted solely of onions, salt, and
the national black bread made out of horse-feed. The woman told us about
the affair of the evening before. At ten or eleven at night, when everybody
was in bed, the manor-house burst into flames. The country-side swarmed
to the rescue, and the family were saved, with one exception, the master. He
did not appear. Everybody was frantic over this loss, and two brave yeomen
sacrificed their lives in ransacking the burning house seeking that valuable
personage. But after a while he was found—what was left of him—which
was his corpse. It was in a copse three hundred yards away, bound, gagged,
stabbed in a dozen places.
Who had done this? Suspicion fell upon a humble family in the
neighborhood who had been lately treated with peculiar harshness by the
baron; and from these people the suspicion easily extended itself to their
relatives and familiars. A suspicion was enough; my lord’s liveried retainers
proclaimed an instant crusade against these people, and were promptly
joined by the community in general. The woman’s husband had been active
with the mob, and had not returned home until nearly dawn. He was gone
now to find out what the general result had been. While we were still
talking he came back from his quest. His report was revolting enough.

Eighteen persons hanged or butchered, and two yeomen and thirteen
prisoners lost in the fire.
“And how many prisoners were there altogether in the vaults?”
“Thirteen.”
“Then every one of them was lost?”
“Yes, all.”
“But the people arrived in time to save the family; how is it they could
save none of the prisoners?”
The man looked puzzled, and said:
“Would one unlock the vaults at such a time? Marry, some would have
escaped.”
“Then you mean that nobody did unlock them?”
“None went near them, either to lock or unlock. It standeth to reason that
the bolts were fast; wherefore it was only needful to establish a watch, so
that if any broke the bonds he might not escape, but be taken. None were
taken.”
“Natheless, three did escape,” said the king, “and ye will do well to
publish it and set justice upon their track, for these murthered the baron and
fired the house.”
I was just expecting he would come out with that. For a moment the man
and his wife showed an eager interest in this news and an impatience to go
out and spread it; then a sudden something else betrayed itself in their faces,
and they began to ask questions. I answered the questions myself, and
narrowly watched the effects produced. I was soon satisfied that the
knowledge of who these three prisoners were had somehow changed the
atmosphere; that our hosts’ continued eagerness to go and spread the news
was now only pretended and not real. The king did not notice the change,
and I was glad of that. I worked the conversation around toward other
details of the night’s proceedings, and noted that these people were relieved
to have it take that direction.
The painful thing observable about all this business was the alacrity with
which this oppressed community had turned their cruel hands against their
own class in the interest of the common oppressor. This man and woman
seemed to feel that in a quarrel between a person of their own class and his

lord, it was the natural and proper and rightful thing for that poor devil’s
whole caste to side with the master and fight his battle for him, without ever
stopping to inquire into the rights or wrongs of the matter. This man had
been out helping to hang his neighbors, and had done his work with zeal,
and yet was aware that there was nothing against them but a mere
suspicion, with nothing back of it describable as evidence, still neither he
nor his wife seemed to see anything horrible about it.
This was depressing—to a man with the dream of a republic in his head.
It reminded me of a time thirteen centuries away, when the “poor whites” of
our South who were always despised and frequently insulted by the slave-
lords around them, and who owed their base condition simply to the
presence of slavery in their midst, were yet pusillanimously ready to side
with the slave-lords in all political moves for the upholding and
perpetuating of slavery, and did also finally shoulder their muskets and pour
out their lives in an effort to prevent the destruction of that very institution
which degraded them. And there was only one redeeming feature connected
with that pitiful piece of history; and that was, that secretly the “poor white”
did detest the slave-lord, and did feel his own shame. That feeling was not
brought to the surface, but the fact that it was there and could have been
brought out, under favoring circumstances, was something—in fact, it was
enough; for it showed that a man is at bottom a man, after all, even if it
doesn’t show on the outside.
Well, as it turned out, this charcoal burner was just the twin of the
Southern “poor white” of the far future. The king presently showed
impatience, and said:
“An ye prattle here all the day, justice will miscarry. Think ye the
criminals will abide in their father’s house? They are fleeing, they are not
waiting. You should look to it that a party of horse be set upon their track.”
The woman paled slightly, but quite perceptibly, and the man looked
flustered and irresolute. I said:
“Come, friend, I will walk a little way with you, and explain which
direction I think they would try to take. If they were merely resisters of the
gabelle or some kindred absurdity I would try to protect them from capture;
but when men murder a person of high degree and likewise burn his house,
that is another matter.”

The last remark was for the king—to quiet him. On the road the man
pulled his resolution together, and began the march with a steady gait, but
there was no eagerness in it. By and by I said:
“What relation were these men to you—cousins?”
He turned as white as his layer of charcoal would let him, and stopped,
trembling.
“Ah, my God, how know ye that?”
“I didn’t know it; it was a chance guess.”
“Poor lads, they are lost. And good lads they were, too.”
“Were you actually going yonder to tell on them?”
He didn’t quite know how to take that; but he said, hesitatingly:
“Ye-s.”
“Then I think you are a damned scoundrel!”
It made him as glad as if I had called him an angel.
“Say the good words again, brother! for surely ye mean that ye would not
betray me an I failed of my duty.”
“Duty? There is no duty in the matter, except the duty to keep still and let
those men get away. They’ve done a righteous deed.”
He looked pleased; pleased, and touched with apprehension at the same
time. He looked up and down the road to see that no one was coming, and
then said in a cautious voice:
“From what land come you, brother, that you speak such perilous words,
and seem not to be afraid?”
“They are not perilous words when spoken to one of my own caste, I take
it. You would not tell anybody I said them?”
“I? I would be drawn asunder by wild horses first.”
“Well, then, let me say my say. I have no fears of your repeating it. I
think devil’s work has been done last night upon those innocent poor
people. That old baron got only what he deserved. If I had my way, all his
kind should have the same luck.”
Fear and depression vanished from the man’s manner, and gratefulness
and a brave animation took their place:

“Even though you be a spy, and your words a trap for my undoing, yet
are they such refreshment that to hear them again and others like to them, I
would go to the gallows happy, as having had one good feast at least in a
starved life. And I will say my say now, and ye may report it if ye be so
minded. I helped to hang my neighbors for that it were peril to my own life
to show lack of zeal in the master’s cause; the others helped for none other
reason. All rejoice to-day that he is dead, but all do go about seemingly
sorrowing, and shedding the hypocrite’s tear, for in that lies safety. I have
said the words, I have said the words! the only ones that have ever tasted
good in my mouth, and the reward of that taste is sufficient. Lead on, an ye
will, be it even to the scaffold, for I am ready.”

There it was, you see. A man is a man, at bottom. Whole ages of abuse
and oppression cannot crush the manhood clear out of him. Whoever thinks
it a mistake is himself mistaken. Yes, there is plenty good enough material
for a republic in the most degraded people that ever existed—even the
Russians; plenty of manhood in them—even in the Germans—if one could
but force it out of its timid and suspicious privacy, to overthrow and trample
in the mud any throne that ever was set up and any nobility that ever
supported it. We should see certain things yet, let us hope and believe. First,
a modified monarchy, till Arthur’s days were done, then the destruction of

the throne, nobility abolished, every member of it bound out to some useful
trade, universal suffrage instituted, and the whole government placed in the
hands of the men and women of the nation there to remain. Yes, there was
no occasion to give up my dream yet a while.

CHAPTER XXXI.
MARCO

We strolled along in a sufficiently indolent fashion now, and talked. We
must dispose of about the amount of time it ought to take to go to the little
hamlet of Abblasoure and put justice on the track of those murderers and
get back home again. And meantime I had an auxiliary interest which had
never paled yet, never lost its novelty for me since I had been in Arthur’s
kingdom: the behavior—born of nice and exact subdivisions of caste—of
chance passers-by toward each other. Toward the shaven monk who trudged
along with his cowl tilted back and the sweat washing down his fat jowls,
the coal-burner was deeply reverent; to the gentleman he was abject; with
the small farmer and the free mechanic he was cordial and gossipy; and

when a slave passed by with a countenance respectfully lowered, this chap’s
nose was in the air—he couldn’t even see him. Well, there are times when
one would like to hang the whole human race and finish the farce.

Presently we struck an incident. A small mob of half-naked boys and girls
came tearing out of the woods, scared and shrieking. The eldest among
them were not more than twelve or fourteen years old. They implored help,
but they were so beside themselves that we couldn’t make out what the
matter was. However, we plunged into the wood, they skurrying in the lead,
and the trouble was quickly revealed: they had hanged a little fellow with a
bark rope, and he was kicking and struggling, in the process of choking to
death. We rescued him, and fetched him around. It was some more human
nature; the admiring little folk imitating their elders; they were playing

mob, and had achieved a success which promised to be a good deal more
serious than they had bargained for.
It was not a dull excursion for me. I managed to put in the time very well.
I made various acquaintanceships, and in my quality of stranger was able to
ask as many questions as I wanted to. A thing which naturally interested me,
as a statesman, was the matter of wages. I picked up what I could under that
head during the afternoon. A man who hasn’t had much experience, and
doesn’t think, is apt to measure a nation’s prosperity or lack of prosperity by
the mere size of the prevailing wages; if the wages be high, the nation is
prosperous; if low, it isn’t. Which is an error. It isn’t what sum you get, it’s
how much you can buy with it, that’s the important thing; and it’s that that
tells whether your wages are high in fact or only high in name. I could
remember how it was in the time of our great civil war in the nineteenth
century. In the North a carpenter got three dollars a day, gold valuation; in
the South he got fifty—payable in Confederate shinplasters worth a dollar a
bushel. In the North a suit of overalls cost three dollars—a day’s wages; in
the South it cost seventy-five—which was two days’ wages. Other things
were in proportion. Consequently, wages were twice as high in the North as
they were in the South, because the one wage had that much more
purchasing power than the other had.
Yes, I made various acquaintances in the hamlet and a thing that gratified
me a good deal was to find our new coins in circulation—lots of milrays,
lots of mills, lots of cents, a good many nickels, and some silver; all this
among the artisans and commonalty generally; yes, and even some gold—
but that was at the bank, that is to say, the goldsmith’s. I dropped in there
while Marco, the son of Marco, was haggling with a shopkeeper over a
quarter of a pound of salt, and asked for change for a twenty-dollar gold
piece. They furnished it—that is, after they had chewed the piece, and rung
it on the counter, and tried acid on it, and asked me where I got it, and who I
was, and where I was from, and where I was going to, and when I expected
to get there, and perhaps a couple of hundred more questions; and when
they got aground, I went right on and furnished them a lot of information
voluntarily; told them I owned a dog, and his name was Watch, and my first
wife was a Free Will Baptist, and her grandfather was a Prohibitionist, and I
used to know a man who had two thumbs on each hand and a wart on the
inside of his upper lip, and died in the hope of a glorious resurrection, and
so on, and so on, and so on, till even that hungry village questioner began to

look satisfied, and also a shade put out; but he had to respect a man of my
financial strength, and so he didn’t give me any lip, but I noticed he took it
out of his underlings, which was a perfectly natural thing to do. Yes, they
changed my twenty, but I judged it strained the bank a little, which was a
thing to be expected, for it was the same as walking into a paltry village
store in the nineteenth century and requiring the boss of it to change a two
thousand-dollar bill for you all of a sudden. He could do it, maybe; but at
the same time he would wonder how a small farmer happened to be
carrying so much money around in his pocket; which was probably this
goldsmith’s thought, too; for he followed me to the door and stood there
gazing after me with reverent admiration.
Our new money was not only handsomely circulating, but its language
was already glibly in use; that is to say, people had dropped the names of
the former moneys, and spoke of things as being worth so many dollars or
cents or mills or milrays now. It was very gratifying. We were progressing,
that was sure.
I got to know several master mechanics, but about the most interesting
fellow among them was the blacksmith, Dowley. He was a live man and a
brisk talker, and had two journeymen and three apprentices, and was doing
a raging business. In fact, he was getting rich, hand over fist, and was vastly
respected. Marco was very proud of having such a man for a friend. He had
taken me there ostensibly to let me see the big establishment which bought
so much of his charcoal, but really to let me see what easy and almost
familiar terms he was on with this great man. Dowley and I fraternized at
once; I had had just such picked men, splendid fellows, under me in the
Colt Arms Factory. I was bound to see more of him, so I invited him to
come out to Marco’s Sunday, and dine with us. Marco was appalled, and
held his breath; and when the grandee accepted, he was so grateful that he
almost forgot to be astonished at the condescension.
Marco’s joy was exuberant—but only for a moment; then he grew
thoughtful, then sad; and when he heard me tell Dowley I should have
Dickon, the boss mason, and Smug, the boss wheelwright, out there, too,
the coal-dust on his face turned to chalk, and he lost his grip. But I knew
what was the matter with him; it was the expense. He saw ruin before him;
he judged that his financial days were numbered. However, on our way to
invite the others, I said:

“You must allow me to have these friends come; and you must also allow
me to pay the costs.”
His face cleared, and he said with spirit:
“But not all of it, not all of it. Ye cannot well bear a burden like to this
alone.”
I stopped him, and said:
“Now let’s understand each other on the spot, old friend. I am only a
farm bailiff, it is true; but I am not poor, nevertheless. I have been very
fortunate this year—you would be astonished to know how I have thriven. I
tell you the honest truth when I say I could squander away as many as a
dozen feasts like this and never care that for the expense!” and I snapped
my fingers. I could see myself rise a foot at a time in Marco’s estimation,
and when I fetched out those last words I was become a very tower for style
and altitude. “So you see, you must let me have my way. You can’t
contribute a cent to this orgy, that’s settled.”
“It’s grand and good of you—”
“No, it isn’t. You’ve opened your house to Jones and me in the most
generous way; Jones was remarking upon it to-day, just before you came
back from the village; for although he wouldn’t be likely to say such a thing
to you—because Jones isn’t a talker, and is diffident in society—he has a
good heart and a grateful, and knows how to appreciate it when he is well
treated; yes, you and your wife have been very hospitable toward us—”

“Ah, brother, ’tis nothing—such hospitality!”
“But it is something; the best a man has, freely given, is always
something, and is as good as a prince can do, and ranks right along beside it
—for even a prince can but do his best. And so we’ll shop around and get
up this layout now, and don’t you worry about the expense. I’m one of the
worst spendthrifts that ever was born. Why, do you know, sometimes in a
single week I spend—but never mind about that—you’d never believe it
anyway.”
And so we went gadding along, dropping in here and there, pricing
things, and gossiping with the shopkeepers about the riot, and now and then
running across pathetic reminders of it, in the persons of shunned and
tearful and houseless remnants of families whose homes had been taken
from them and their parents butchered or hanged. The raiment of Marco and
his wife was of coarse tow-linen and linsey-woolsey respectively, and
resembled township maps, it being made up pretty exclusively of patches
which had been added, township by township, in the course of five or six
years, until hardly a hand’s-breadth of the original garments was surviving

and present. Now I wanted to fit these people out with new suits, on
account of that swell company, and I didn’t know just how to get at it—with
delicacy, until at last it struck me that as I had already been liberal in
inventing wordy gratitude for the king, it would be just the thing to back it
up with evidence of a substantial sort; so I said:
“And Marco, there’s another thing which you must permit—out of
kindness for Jones—because you wouldn’t want to offend him. He was very
anxious to testify his appreciation in some way, but he is so diffident he
couldn’t venture it himself, and so he begged me to buy some little things
and give them to you and Dame Phyllis and let him pay for them without
your ever knowing they came from him—you know how a delicate person
feels about that sort of thing—and so I said I would, and we would keep
mum. Well, his idea was, a new outfit of clothes for you both—”
“Oh, it is wastefulness! It may not be, brother, it may not be. Consider
the vastness of the sum—”
“Hang the vastness of the sum! Try to keep quiet for a moment, and see
how it would seem; a body can’t get in a word edgeways, you talk so much.
You ought to cure that, Marco; it isn’t good form, you know, and it will
grow on you if you don’t check it. Yes, we’ll step in here now and price this
man’s stuff—and don’t forget to remember to not let on to Jones that you
know he had anything to do with it. You can’t think how curiously sensitive
and proud he is. He’s a farmer—pretty fairly well-to-do farmer—and I’m
his bailiff; but—the imagination of that man! Why, sometimes when he
forgets himself and gets to blowing off, you’d think he was one of the
swells of the earth; and you might listen to him a hundred years and never
take him for a farmer—especially if he talked agriculture. He thinks he’s a
Sheol of a farmer; thinks he’s old Grayback from Wayback; but between
you and me privately he don’t know as much about farming as he does
about running a kingdom—still, whatever he talks about, you want to drop
your underjaw and listen, the same as if you had never heard such
incredible wisdom in all your life before, and were afraid you might die
before you got enough of it. That will please Jones.”
It tickled Marco to the marrow to hear about such an odd character; but it
also prepared him for accidents; and in my experience when you travel with
a king who is letting on to be something else and can’t remember it more
than about half the time, you can’t take too many precautions.

This was the best store we had come across yet; it had everything in it, in
small quantities, from anvils and drygoods all the way down to fish and
pinchbeck jewelry. I concluded I would bunch my whole invoice right here,
and not go pricing around any more. So I got rid of Marco, by sending him
off to invite the mason and the wheelwright, which left the field free to me.
For I never care to do a thing in a quiet way; it’s got to be theatrical or I
don’t take any interest in it. I showed up money enough, in a careless way,
to corral the shopkeeper’s respect, and then I wrote down a list of the things
I wanted, and handed it to him to see if he could read it. He could, and was
proud to show that he could. He said he had been educated by a priest, and
could both read and write. He ran it through, and remarked with satisfaction
that it was a pretty heavy bill. Well, and so it was, for a little concern like
that. I was not only providing a swell dinner, but some odds and ends of
extras. I ordered that the things be carted out and delivered at the dwelling
of Marco, the son of Marco, by Saturday evening, and send me the bill at
dinner-time Sunday. He said I could depend upon his promptness and
exactitude, it was the rule of the house. He also observed that he would
throw in a couple of miller-guns for the Marcos gratis—that everybody was
using them now. He had a mighty opinion of that clever device. I said:
“And please fill them up to the middle mark, too; and add that to the
bill.”
He would, with pleasure. He filled them, and I took them with me. I
couldn’t venture to tell him that the miller-gun was a little invention of my
own, and that I had officially ordered that every shopkeeper in the kingdom
keep them on hand and sell them at government price—which was the
merest trifle, and the shopkeeper got that, not the government. We furnished
them for nothing.
The king had hardly missed us when we got back at nightfall. He had
early dropped again into his dream of a grand invasion of Gaul with the
whole strength of his kingdom at his back, and the afternoon had slipped
away without his ever coming to himself again.

CHAPTER XXXII.
DOWLEY’S HUMILIATION

Well, when that cargo arrived toward sunset, Saturday afternoon, I had
my hands full to keep the Marcos from fainting. They were sure Jones and I
were ruined past help, and they blamed themselves as accessories to this
bankruptcy. You see, in addition to the dinner-materials, which called for a
sufficiently round sum, I had bought a lot of extras for the future comfort of
the family: for instance, a big lot of wheat, a delicacy as rare to the tables of
their class as was ice-cream to a hermit’s; also a sizeable deal dinner-table;
also two entire pounds of salt, which was another piece of extravagance in
those people’s eyes; also crockery, stools, the clothes, a small cask of beer,
and so on. I instructed the Marcos to keep quiet about this sumptuousness,
so as to give me a chance to surprise the guests and show off a little.

Concerning the new clothes, the simple couple were like children; they
were up and down, all night, to see if it wasn’t nearly daylight, so that they
could put them on, and they were into them at last as much as an hour
before dawn was due. Then their pleasure—not to say delirium—was so
fresh and novel and inspiring that the sight of it paid me well for the
interruptions which my sleep had suffered. The king had slept just as usual
—like the dead. The Marcos could not thank him for their clothes, that
being forbidden; but they tried every way they could think of to make him
see how grateful they were. Which all went for nothing: he didn’t notice
any change.
It turned out to be one of those rich and rare fall days which is just a June
day toned down to a degree where it is heaven to be out of doors. Toward
noon the guests arrived, and we assembled under a great tree and were soon
as sociable as old acquaintances. Even the king’s reserve melted a little,
though it was some little trouble to him to adjust himself to the name of
Jones along at first. I had asked him to try to not forget that he was a
farmer; but I had also considered it prudent to ask him to let the thing stand
at that, and not elaborate it any. Because he was just the kind of person you
could depend on to spoil a little thing like that if you didn’t warn him, his
tongue was so handy, and his spirit so willing, and his information so
uncertain.

Dowley was in fine feather, and I early got him started, and then adroitly
worked him around onto his own history for a text and himself for a hero,
and then it was good to sit there and hear him hum. Self-made man, you
know. They know how to talk. They do deserve more credit than any other
breed of men, yes, that is true; and they are among the very first to find it
out, too. He told how he had begun life an orphan lad without money and
without friends able to help him; how he had lived as the slaves of the
meanest master lived; how his day’s work was from sixteen to eighteen
hours long, and yielded him only enough black bread to keep him in a half-
fed condition; how his faithful endeavors finally attracted the attention of a
good blacksmith, who came near knocking him dead with kindness by
suddenly offering, when he was totally unprepared, to take him as his bound
apprentice for nine years and give him board and clothes and teach him the
trade—or “mystery” as Dowley called it. That was his first great rise, his
first gorgeous stroke of fortune; and you saw that he couldn’t yet speak of it
without a sort of eloquent wonder and delight that such a gilded promotion
should have fallen to the lot of a common human being. He got no new
clothing during his apprenticeship, but on his graduation day his master

tricked him out in spang-new tow-linens and made him feel unspeakably
rich and fine.
“I remember me of that day!” the wheelwright sang out, with enthusiasm.
“And I likewise!” cried the mason. “I would not believe they were thine
own; in faith I could not.”
“Nor other!” shouted Dowley, with sparkling eyes. “I was like to lose my
character, the neighbors wending I had mayhap been stealing. It was a great
day, a great day; one forgetteth not days like that.”
Yes, and his master was a fine man, and prosperous, and always had a
great feast of meat twice in the year, and with it white bread, true wheaten
bread; in fact, lived like a lord, so to speak. And in time Dowley succeeded
to the business and married the daughter.
“And now consider what is come to pass,” said he, impressively. “Two
times in every month there is fresh meat upon my table.” He made a pause
here, to let that fact sink home, then added—“and eight times salt meat.”
“It is even true,” said the wheelwright, with bated breath.
“I know it of mine own knowledge,” said the mason, in the same reverent
fashion.
“On my table appeareth white bread every Sunday in the year,” added the
master smith, with solemnity. “I leave it to your own consciences, friends, if
this is not also true?”
“By my head, yes,” cried the mason.
“I can testify it—and I do,” said the wheelwright.
“And as to furniture, ye shall say yourselves what mine equipment is.”
He waved his hand in fine gesture of granting frank and unhampered
freedom of speech, and added: “Speak as ye are moved; speak as ye would
speak; an I were not here.”
“Ye have five stools, and of the sweetest workmanship at that, albeit your
family is but three,” said the wheelwright, with deep respect.
“And six wooden goblets, and six platters of wood and two of pewter to
eat and drink from withal,” said the mason, impressively. “And I say it as
knowing God is my judge, and we tarry not here alway, but must answer at
the last day for the things said in the body, be they false or be they sooth.”

“Now ye know what manner of man I am, brother Jones,” said the smith,
with a fine and friendly condescension, “and doubtless ye would look to
find me a man jealous of his due of respect and but sparing of outgo to
strangers till their rating and quality be assured, but trouble yourself not, as
concerning that; wit ye well ye shall find me a man that regardeth not these
matters but is willing to receive any he as his fellow and equal that carrieth
a right heart in his body, be his worldly estate howsoever modest. And in
token of it, here is my hand; and I say with my own mouth we are equals—
equals”—and he smiled around on the company with the satisfaction of a
god who is doing the handsome and gracious thing and is quite well aware
of it.
The king took the hand with a poorly disguised reluctance, and let go of
it as willingly as a lady lets go of a fish; all of which had a good effect, for
it was mistaken for an embarrassment natural to one who was being called
upon by greatness.
The dame brought out the table now, and set it under the tree. It caused a
visible stir of surprise, it being brand new and a sumptuous article of deal.
But the surprise rose higher still when the dame, with a body oozing easy
indifference at every pore, but eyes that gave it all away by absolutely
flaming with vanity, slowly unfolded an actual simon-pure tablecloth and
spread it. That was a notch above even the blacksmith’s domestic
grandeurs, and it hit him hard; you could see it. But Marco was in Paradise;
you could see that, too. Then the dame brought two fine new stools—
whew! that was a sensation; it was visible in the eyes of every guest. Then
she brought two more—as calmly as she could. Sensation again—with
awed murmurs. Again she brought two—walking on air, she was so proud.
The guests were petrified, and the mason muttered:
“There is that about earthly pomps which doth ever move to reverence.”
As the dame turned away, Marco couldn’t help slapping on the climax
while the thing was hot; so he said with what was meant for a languid
composure but was a poor imitation of it:
“These suffice; leave the rest.”
So there were more yet! It was a fine effect. I couldn’t have played the
hand better myself.
From this out, the madam piled up the surprises with a rush that fired the
general astonishment up to a hundred and fifty in the shade, and at the same

time paralyzed expression of it down to gasped “Oh’s” and “Ah’s,” and
mute upliftings of hands and eyes. She fetched crockery—new, and plenty
of it; new wooden goblets and other table furniture; and beer, fish, chicken,
a goose, eggs, roast beef, roast mutton, a ham, a small roast pig, and a
wealth of genuine white wheaten bread. Take it by and large, that spread
laid everything far and away in the shade that ever that crowd had seen
before. And while they sat there just simply stupefied with wonder and awe,
I sort of waved my hand as if by accident, and the storekeeper’s son
emerged from space and said he had come to collect.

“That’s all right,” I said, indifferently. “What is the amount? give us the
items.”
Then he read off this bill, while those three amazed men listened, and
serene waves of satisfaction rolled over my soul and alternate waves of
terror and admiration surged over Marco’s:

He ceased. There was a pale and awful silence. Not a limb stirred. Not a
nostril betrayed the passage of breath.
“Is that all?” I asked, in a voice of the most perfect calmness.
“All, fair sir, save that certain matters of light moment are placed
together under a head hight sundries. If it would like you, I will sepa—”
“It is of no consequence,” I said, accompanying the words with a gesture
of the most utter indifference; “give me the grand total, please.”
The clerk leaned against the tree to stay himself, and said:
“Thirty-nine thousand one hundred and fifty milrays!”
The wheelwright fell off his stool, the others grabbed the table to save
themselves, and there was a deep and general ejaculation of:
“God be with us in the day of disaster!”
The clerk hastened to say:
“My father chargeth me to say he cannot honorably require you to pay it
all at this time, and therefore only prayeth you—”
I paid no more heed than if it were the idle breeze, but, with an air of
indifference amounting almost to weariness, got out my money and tossed
four dollars on to the table. Ah, you should have seen them stare!
The clerk was astonished and charmed. He asked me to retain one of the
dollars as security, until he could go to town and—I interrupted:
“What, and fetch back nine cents? Nonsense! Take the whole. Keep the
change.”
There was an amazed murmur to this effect:

“Verily this being is made of money! He throweth it away even as if it
were dirt.”
The blacksmith was a crushed man.
The clerk took his money and reeled away drunk with fortune. I said to
Marco and his wife:
“Good folk, here is a little trifle for you”—handing the miller-guns as if it
were a matter of no consequence, though each of them contained fifteen
cents in solid cash; and while the poor creatures went to pieces with
astonishment and gratitude, I turned to the others and said as calmly as one
would ask the time of day:
“Well, if we are all ready, I judge the dinner is. Come, fall to.”
Ah, well, it was immense; yes, it was a daisy. I don’t know that I ever put
a situation together better, or got happier spectacular effects out of the
materials available. The blacksmith—well, he was simply mashed. Land! I
wouldn’t have felt what that man was feeling, for anything in the world.
Here he had been blowing and bragging about his grand meat-feast twice a
year, and his fresh meat twice a month, and his salt meat twice a week, and
his white bread every Sunday the year round—all for a family of three; the
entire cost for the year not above 69.2.6 (sixty-nine cents, two mills and six
milrays), and all of a sudden here comes along a man who slashes out
nearly four dollars on a single blow-out; and not only that, but acts as if it
made him tired to handle such small sums. Yes, Dowley was a good deal
wilted, and shrunk-up and collapsed; he had the aspect of a bladder-balloon
that’s been stepped on by a cow.

CHAPTER XXXIII.
SIXTH CENTURY POLITICAL ECONOMY

However, I made a dead set at him, and before the first third of the dinner
was reached, I had him happy again. It was easy to do—in a country of
ranks and castes. You see, in a country where they have ranks and castes, a
man isn’t ever a man, he is only part of a man, he can’t ever get his full
growth. You prove your superiority over him in station, or rank, or fortune,
and that’s the end of it—he knuckles down. You can’t insult him after that.
No, I don’t mean quite that; of course you can insult him, I only mean it’s
difficult; and so, unless you’ve got a lot of useless time on your hands it
doesn’t pay to try. I had the smith’s reverence now, because I was
apparently immensely prosperous and rich; I could have had his adoration if

I had had some little gimcrack title of nobility. And not only his, but any
commoner’s in the land, though he were the mightiest production of all the
ages, in intellect, worth, and character, and I bankrupt in all three. This was
to remain so, as long as England should exist in the earth. With the spirit of
prophecy upon me, I could look into the future and see her erect statues and
monuments to her unspeakable Georges and other royal and noble clothes-
horses, and leave unhonored the creators of this world—after God—
Gutenburg, Watt, Arkwright, Whitney, Morse, Stephenson, Bell.
The king got his cargo aboard, and then, the talk not turning upon battle,
conquest, or iron-clad duel, he dulled down to drowsiness and went off to
take a nap. Mrs. Marco cleared the table, placed the beer keg handy, and
went away to eat her dinner of leavings in humble privacy, and the rest of
us soon drifted into matters near and dear to the hearts of our sort—business
and wages, of course. At a first glance, things appeared to be exceeding
prosperous in this little tributary kingdom—whose lord was King
Bagdemagus—as compared with the state of things in my own region. They
had the “protection” system in full force here, whereas we were working
along down toward free trade, by easy stages, and were now about half way.
Before long, Dowley and I were doing all the talking, the others hungrily
listening. Dowley warmed to his work, snuffed an advantage in the air, and
began to put questions which he considered pretty awkward ones for me,
and they did have something of that look:
“In your country, brother, what is the wage of a master bailiff, master
hind, carter, shepherd, swineherd?”
“Twenty-five milrays a day; that is to say, a quarter of a cent.”
The smith’s face beamed with joy. He said:
“With us they are allowed the double of it! And what may a mechanic get
—carpenter, dauber, mason, painter, blacksmith, wheelwright, and the
like?”
“On the average, fifty milrays; half a cent a day.”

“Ho-ho! With us they are allowed a hundred! With us any good mechanic
is allowed a cent a day! I count out the tailor, but not the others—they are
all allowed a cent a day, and in driving times they get more—yes, up to a
hundred and ten and even fifteen milrays a day. I’ve paid a hundred and
fifteen myself, within the week. ’Rah for protection—to Sheol with free-
trade!”
And his face shone upon the company like a sunburst. But I didn’t scare
at all. I rigged up my pile-driver, and allowed myself fifteen minutes to
drive him into the earth—drive him all in—drive him in till not even the
curve of his skull should show above ground. Here is the way I started in on
him. I asked:
“What do you pay a pound for salt?”
“A hundred milrays.”
“We pay forty. What do you pay for beef and mutton—when you buy it?”
That was a neat hit; it made the color come.
“It varieth somewhat, but not much; one may say seventy-five milrays
the pound.”
“We pay thirty-three. What do you pay for eggs?”

“Fifty milrays the dozen.”
“We pay twenty. What do you pay for beer?”
“It costeth us eight and one-half milrays the pint.”
“We get it for four; twenty-five bottles for a cent. What do you pay for
wheat?”
“At the rate of nine hundred milrays the bushel.”
“We pay four hundred. What do you pay for a man’s tow-linen suit?”
“Thirteen cents.”
“We pay six. What do you pay for a stuff gown for the wife of the laborer
or the mechanic?”
“We pay eight cents, four mills.”
“Well, observe the difference: you pay eight cents and four mills, we pay
only four cents.” I prepared now to sock it to him. I said: “Look here, dear
friend, what’s become of your high wages you were bragging so about a few
minutes ago? “—and I looked around on the company with placid
satisfaction, for I had slipped up on him gradually and tied him hand and
foot, you see, without his ever noticing that he was being tied at all.
“What’s become of those noble high wages of yours?—I seem to have
knocked the stuffing all out of them, it appears to me.”
But if you will believe me, he merely looked surprised, that is all! he
didn’t grasp the situation at all, didn’t know he had walked into a trap,
didn’t discover that he was in a trap. I could have shot him, from sheer
vexation. With cloudy eye and a struggling intellect he fetched this out:
“Marry, I seem not to understand. It is proved that our wages be double
thine; how then may it be that thou’st knocked therefrom the stuffing?—an
miscall not the wonderly word, this being the first time under grace and
providence of God it hath been granted me to hear it.”
Well, I was stunned; partly with this unlooked-for stupidity on his part,
and partly because his fellows so manifestly sided with him and were of his
mind—if you might call it mind. My position was simple enough, plain
enough; how could it ever be simplified more? However, I must try:
“Why, look here, brother Dowley, don’t you see? Your wages are merely
higher than ours in name, not in fact.”
“Hear him! They are the double—ye have confessed it yourself.”

“Yes-yes, I don’t deny that at all. But that’s got nothing to do with it; the
amount of the wages in mere coins, with meaningless names attached to
them to know them by, has got nothing to do with it. The thing is, how
much can you buy with your wages?—that’s the idea. While it is true that
with you a good mechanic is allowed about three dollars and a half a year,
and with us only about a dollar and seventy-five—”
“There—ye’re confessing it again, ye’re confessing it again!”
“Confound it, I’ve never denied it, I tell you! What I say is this. With us
half a dollar buys more than a dollar buys with you—and therefore it stands
to reason and the commonest kind of common-sense, that our wages are
higher than yours.”
He looked dazed, and said, despairingly:
“Verily, I cannot make it out. Ye’ve just said ours are the higher, and with
the same breath ye take it back.”
“Oh, great Scott, isn’t it possible to get such a simple thing through your
head? Now look here—let me illustrate. We pay four cents for a woman’s
stuff gown, you pay 8.4.0, which is four mills more than double. What do
you allow a laboring woman who works on a farm?”
“Two mills a day.”
“Very good; we allow but half as much; we pay her only a tenth of a cent
a day; and—”
“Again ye’re conf—”
“Wait! Now, you see, the thing is very simple; this time you’ll understand
it. For instance, it takes your woman 42 days to earn her gown, at 2 mills a
day—7 weeks’ work; but ours earns hers in forty days—two days short of 7
weeks. Your woman has a gown, and her whole seven weeks wages are
gone; ours has a gown, and two days’ wages left, to buy something else
with. There—now you understand it!”
He looked—well, he merely looked dubious, it’s the most I can say; so
did the others. I waited—to let the thing work. Dowley spoke at last—and
betrayed the fact that he actually hadn’t gotten away from his rooted and
grounded superstitions yet. He said, with a trifle of hesitancy:
“But—but—ye cannot fail to grant that two mills a day is better than
one.”

Shucks! Well, of course, I hated to give it up. So I chanced another flyer:
“Let us suppose a case. Suppose one of your journeymen goes out and
buys the following articles:
“1 pound of salt;
1 dozen eggs;
1 dozen pints of beer;
1 bushel of wheat;
1 tow-linen suit;
5 pounds of beef;
5 pounds of mutton.
“The lot will cost him 32 cents. It takes him 32 working days to earn the
money—5 weeks and 2 days. Let him come to us and work 32 days at half
the wages; he can buy all those things for a shade under 14 1/2 cents; they
will cost him a shade under 29 days’ work, and he will have about half a
week’s wages over. Carry it through the year; he would save nearly a
week’s wages every two months, your man nothing; thus saving five or six
weeks’ wages in a year, your man not a cent. Now I reckon you understand
that ‘high wages’ and ‘low wages’ are phrases that don’t mean anything in
the world until you find out which of them will buy the most!”
It was a crusher.

But, alas! it didn’t crush. No, I had to give it up. What those people
valued was high wages; it didn’t seem to be a matter of any consequence to
them whether the high wages would buy anything or not. They stood for
“protection,” and swore by it, which was reasonable enough, because
interested parties had gulled them into the notion that it was protection
which had created their high wages. I proved to them that in a quarter of a
century their wages had advanced but 30 per cent., while the cost of living
had gone up 100; and that with us, in a shorter time, wages had advanced 40

per cent. while the cost of living had gone steadily down. But it didn’t do
any good. Nothing could unseat their strange beliefs.
Well, I was smarting under a sense of defeat. Undeserved defeat, but
what of that? That didn’t soften the smart any. And to think of the
circumstances! the first statesman of the age, the capablest man, the best-
informed man in the entire world, the loftiest uncrowned head that had
moved through the clouds of any political firmament for centuries, sitting
here apparently defeated in argument by an ignorant country blacksmith!
And I could see that those others were sorry for me—which made me blush
till I could smell my whiskers scorching. Put yourself in my place; feel as
mean as I did, as ashamed as I felt—wouldn’t you have struck below the
belt to get even? Yes, you would; it is simply human nature. Well, that is
what I did. I am not trying to justify it; I’m only saying that I was mad, and
anybody would have done it.
Well, when I make up my mind to hit a man, I don’t plan out a love-tap;
no, that isn’t my way; as long as I’m going to hit him at all, I’m going to hit
him a lifter. And I don’t jump at him all of a sudden, and risk making a
blundering half-way business of it; no, I get away off yonder to one side,
and work up on him gradually, so that he never suspects that I’m going to
hit him at all; and by and by, all in a flash, he’s flat on his back, and he can’t
tell for the life of him how it all happened. That is the way I went for
brother Dowley. I started to talking lazy and comfortable, as if I was just
talking to pass the time; and the oldest man in the world couldn’t have taken
the bearings of my starting place and guessed where I was going to fetch
up:
“Boys, there’s a good many curious things about law, and custom, and
usage, and all that sort of thing, when you come to look at it; yes, and about
the drift and progress of human opinion and movement, too. There are
written laws—they perish; but there are also unwritten laws—they are
eternal. Take the unwritten law of wages: it says they’ve got to advance,
little by little, straight through the centuries. And notice how it works. We
know what wages are now, here and there and yonder; we strike an average,
and say that’s the wages of to-day. We know what the wages were a
hundred years ago, and what they were two hundred years ago; that’s as far
back as we can get, but it suffices to give us the law of progress, the
measure and rate of the periodical augmentation; and so, without a

document to help us, we can come pretty close to determining what the
wages were three and four and five hundred years ago. Good, so far. Do we
stop there? No. We stop looking backward; we face around and apply the
law to the future. My friends, I can tell you what people’s wages are going
to be at any date in the future you want to know, for hundreds and hundreds
of years.”
“What, goodman, what!”
“Yes. In seven hundred years wages will have risen to six times what
they are now, here in your region, and farm hands will be allowed 3 cents a
day, and mechanics 6.”
“I would’t I might die now and live then!” interrupted Smug, the
wheelwright, with a fine avaricious glow in his eye.
“And that isn’t all; they’ll get their board besides—such as it is: it won’t
bloat them. Two hundred and fifty years later—pay attention now—a
mechanic’s wages will be—mind you, this is law, not guesswork; a
mechanic’s wages will then be twenty cents a day!”
There was a general gasp of awed astonishment, Dickon the mason
murmured, with raised eyes and hands:
“More than three weeks’ pay for one day’s work!”
“Riches!—of a truth, yes, riches!” muttered Marco, his breath coming
quick and short, with excitement.
“Wages will keep on rising, little by little, little by little, as steadily as a
tree grows, and at the end of three hundred and forty years more there’ll be
at least one country where the mechanic’s average wage will be two
hundred cents a day!”
It knocked them absolutely dumb! Not a man of them could get his
breath for upwards of two minutes. Then the coal-burner said prayerfully:
“Might I but live to see it!”
“It is the income of an earl!” said Smug.
“An earl, say ye?” said Dowley; “ye could say more than that and speak
no lie; there’s no earl in the realm of Bagdemagus that hath an income like
to that. Income of an earl—mf! it’s the income of an angel!”
“Now, then, that is what is going to happen as regards wages. In that
remote day, that man will earn, with one week’s work, that bill of goods

which it takes you upwards of fifty weeks to earn now. Some other pretty
surprising things are going to happen, too. Brother Dowley, who is it that
determines, every spring, what the particular wage of each kind of
mechanic, laborer, and servant shall be for that year?”
“Sometimes the courts, sometimes the town council; but most of all, the
magistrate. Ye may say, in general terms, it is the magistrate that fixes the
wages.”
“Doesn’t ask any of those poor devils to help him fix their wages for
them, does he?”
“Hm! That were an idea! The master that’s to pay him the money is the
one that’s rightly concerned in that matter, ye will notice.”
“Yes—but I thought the other man might have some little trifle at stake in
it, too; and even his wife and children, poor creatures. The masters are
these: nobles, rich men, the prosperous generally. These few, who do no
work, determine what pay the vast hive shall have who do work. You see?
They’re a ‘combine’—a trade union, to coin a new phrase—who band
themselves together to force their lowly brother to take what they choose to
give. Thirteen hundred years hence—so says the unwritten law—the
‘combine’ will be the other way, and then how these fine people’s posterity
will fume and fret and grit their teeth over the insolent tyranny of trade
unions! Yes, indeed! the magistrate will tranquilly arrange the wages from
now clear away down into the nineteenth century; and then all of a sudden
the wage-earner will consider that a couple of thousand years or so is
enough of this one-sided sort of thing; and he will rise up and take a hand in
fixing his wages himself. Ah, he will have a long and bitter account of
wrong and humiliation to settle.”
“Do ye believe—”
“That he actually will help to fix his own wages? Yes, indeed. And he
will be strong and able, then.”
“Brave times, brave times, of a truth!” sneered the prosperous smith.

“Oh,—and there’s another detail. In that day, a master may hire a man for
only just one day, or one week, or one month at a time, if he wants to.”
“What?”
“It’s true. Moreover, a magistrate won’t be able to force a man to work
for a master a whole year on a stretch whether the man wants to or not.”
“Will there be no law or sense in that day?”
“Both of them, Dowley. In that day a man will be his own property, not
the property of magistrate and master. And he can leave town whenever he
wants to, if the wages don’t suit him!—and they can’t put him in the pillory
for it.”
“Perdition catch such an age!” shouted Dowley, in strong indignation.
“An age of dogs, an age barren of reverence for superiors and respect for
authority! The pillory—”
“Oh, wait, brother; say no good word for that institution. I think the
pillory ought to be abolished.”
“A most strange idea. Why?”
“Well, I’ll tell you why. Is a man ever put in the pillory for a capital
crime?”
“No.”
“Is it right to condemn a man to a slight punishment for a small offense
and then kill him?”
There was no answer. I had scored my first point! For the first time, the
smith wasn’t up and ready. The company noticed it. Good effect.
“You don’t answer, brother. You were about to glorify the pillory a while
ago, and shed some pity on a future age that isn’t going to use it. I think the
pillory ought to be abolished. What usually happens when a poor fellow is
put in the pillory for some little offense that didn’t amount to anything in
the world? The mob try to have some fun with him, don’t they?”