A CONNECTICUT YANKEE
IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT

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

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 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:

“Transvaaltruppentropentransporttrampelthiertreibertrauungsthraenen-
tragoedie!”

—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:

“Mekkamuselmannenmassenmenchenmoerdermohrenmuttermarmormonumentenmacher!”

—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 peace—fuller than that? It was his reward for a
cruel life patiently borne.”

There was a slight noise from the direction of the dim corner where the
ladder was. It was the king descending. I could see that he
was bearing 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.”