A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT

 by

 MARK TWAIN (Samuel L. Clemens)

 Part 4. 

CHAPTER XVII

A ROYAL BANQUET

Madame, seeing me pacific and unresentful, no doubt judged thatI was deceived by her excuse; for her fright dissolved away, andshe was soon so importunate to have me give an exhibition and killsomebody, that the thing grew to be embarrassing. However, to myrelief she was presently interrupted by the call to prayers. I willsay this much for the nobility: that, tyrannical, murderous, rapacious, and morally rotten as they were, they were deeply andenthusiastically religious. Nothing could divert them from theregular and faithful performance of the pieties enjoined by theChurch. More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten hisenemy at a disadvantage, stop to pray before cutting his throat;more than once I had seen a noble, after ambushing and despatchinghis enemy, retire to the nearest wayside shrine and humbly givethanks, without even waiting to rob the body. There was to benothing finer or sweeter in the life of even Benvenuto Cellini, that rough-hewn saint, ten centuries later. All the nobles ofBritain, with their families, attended divine service morning andnight daily, in their private chapels, and even the worst of themhad family worship five or six times a day besides. The creditof this belonged entirely to the Church. Although I was no friendto that Catholic Church, I was obliged to admit this. And often, in spite of me, I found myself saying, "What would this countrybe without the Church?"

After prayers we had dinner in a great banqueting hall which waslighted by hundreds of grease-jets, and everything was as fine andlavish and rudely splendid as might become the royal degree of thehosts. At the head of the hall, on a dais, was the table of theking, queen, and their son, Prince Uwaine. Stretching down the hallfrom this, was the general table, on the floor. At this, abovethe salt, sat the visiting nobles and the grown members of theirfamilies, of both sexes, --the resident Court, in effect--sixty-onepersons; below the salt sat minor officers of the household, withtheir principal subordinates: altogether a hundred and eighteenpersons sitting, and about as many liveried servants standingbehind their chairs, or serving in one capacity or another. It wasa very fine show. In a gallery a band with cymbals, horns, harps, and other horrors, opened the proceedings with what seemed to bethe crude first-draft or original agony of the wail known to latercenturies as "In the Sweet Bye and Bye. " It was new, and oughtto have been rehearsed a little more. For some reason or otherthe queen had the composer hanged, after dinner. 

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

The havoc continued an hour and a half, and unimaginable was thedestruction of substantials. Of the chief feature of the feast--the huge wild boar that lay stretched out so portly and imposingat 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 allthe other dishes. 

With the pastries and so on, the heavy drinking began--and the talk. Gallon after gallon of wine and mead disappeared, and everybodygot comfortable, then happy, then sparklingly joyous--both sexes, --and by and by pretty noisy. Men told anecdotes that were terrificto hear, but nobody blushed; and when the nub was sprung, theassemblage let go with a horse-laugh that shook the fortress. Ladies answered back with historiettes that would almost have madeQueen Margaret of Navarre or even the great Elizabeth of Englandhide 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 thechaplain any, he had his laugh with the rest; more than that, uponinvitation he roared out a song which was of as daring a sort asany that was sung that night. 

By midnight everybody was fagged out, and sore with laughing; and, as a rule, drunk: some weepingly, some affectionately, somehilariously, some quarrelsomely, some dead and under the table. Of the ladies, the worst spectacle was a lovely young duchess, whosewedding-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 theyoung daughter of the Regent d'Orleans, at the famous dinner whenceshe 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 allconscious heads were bowed in reverent expectation of the comingblessing, there appeared under the arch of the far-off door atthe bottom of the hall an old and bent and white-haired lady, leaning upon a crutch-stick; and she lifted the stick and pointed ittoward 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 thisold heart that had nor chick, nor friend nor stay nor comfort inall this world but him!"

Everybody crossed himself in a grisly fright, for a curse was anawful thing to those people; but the queen rose up majestic, withthe 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 acruel 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 indicatedme, and said:

"Madame, _he_ saith this may not be. Recall the commandment, or hewill dissolve the castle and it shall vanish away like the instablefabric of a dream!"

Confound it, what a crazy contract to pledge a person to! What ifthe queen--

But my consternation subsided there, and my panic passed off;for the queen, all in a collapse, made no show of resistance butgave a countermanding sign and sunk into her seat. When she reachedit 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 changemy mind and puff the castle into the measureless dim vacancies ofspace. Well, well, well, they _were_ a superstitious lot. It isall a body can do to conceive of it. 

The poor queen was so scared and humbled that she was even afraidto hang the composer without first consulting me. I was very sorryfor her--indeed, any one would have been, for she was reallysuffering; so I was willing to do anything that was reasonable, andhad no desire to carry things to wanton extremities. I thereforeconsidered the matter thoughtfully, and ended by having themusicians ordered into our presence to play that Sweet Bye andBye again, which they did. Then I saw that she was right, andgave her permission to hang the whole band. This little relaxationof sternness had a good effect upon the queen. A statesman gainslittle by the arbitrary exercise of iron-clad authority upon alloccasions that offer, for this wounds the just pride of hissubordinates, and thus tends to undermine his strength. A littleconcession, 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 measurablyhappy, her wine naturally began to assert itself again, and it gota little the start of her. I mean it set her music going--her silverbell of a tongue. Dear me, she was a master talker. It would notbecome me to suggest that it was pretty late and that I was a tiredman and very sleepy. I wished I had gone off to bed when I hadthe chance. Now I must stick it out; there was no other way. Soshe tinkled along and along, in the otherwise profound and ghostlyhush of the sleeping castle, until by and by there came, as iffrom 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 tiltedher graceful head as a bird does when it listens. The sound boredits 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 nothis 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 thatman's pain. Conducted by mailed guards bearing flaring torches, we tramped along echoing corridors, and down stone stairways dankand dripping, and smelling of mould and ages of imprisoned night--a chill, uncanny journey and a long one, and not made the shorteror the cheerier by the sorceress's talk, which was about thissufferer and his crime. He had been accused by an anonymousinformer, 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 bynight, 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 hardywretch near to the spot where the stag lay, and came with rightloyal zeal and betrayed him to the forester. "

"So the Unknown was near the dead stag, too? Isn't it just possiblethat he did the killing himself? His loyal zeal--in a mask--looksjust a shade suspicious. But what is your highness's idea forracking the prisoner? Where is the profit?"

"He will not confess, else; and then were his soul lost. For hiscrime his life is forfeited by the law--and of a surety will I seethat he payeth it!--but it were peril to my own soul to let himdie unconfessed and unabsolved. Nay, I were a fool to fling meinto 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 heconfess not, it will peradventure show that he had indeed naughtto confess--ye will grant that that is sooth? Then shall I not bedamned 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 toargue with her. Arguments have no chance against petrifiedtraining; they wear it as little as the waves wear a cliff. Andher training was everybody's. The brightest intellect in the landwould not have been able to see that her position was defective. 

As we entered the rack-cell I caught a picture that will not gofrom me; I wish it would. A native young giant of thirty orthereabouts lay stretched upon the frame on his back, with hiswrists and ankles tied to ropes which led over windlasses at eitherend. There was no color in him; his features were contorted andset, and sweat-drops stood upon his forehead. A priest bent overhim on each side; the executioner stood by; guards were on duty;smoking torches stood in sockets along the walls; in a cornercrouched a poor young creature, her face drawn with anguish, a half-wild and hunted look in her eyes, and in her lap lay a littlechild asleep. Just as we stepped across the threshold theexecutioner gave his machine a slight turn, which wrung a cryfrom both the prisoner and the woman; but I shouted, and theexecutioner released the strain without waiting to see who spoke. I could not let this horror go on; it would have killed me tosee it. I asked the queen to let me clear the place and speakto the prisoner privately; and when she was going to object I spokein a low voice and said I did not want to make a scene beforeher servants, but I must have my way; for I was King Arthur'srepresentative, and was speaking in his name. She saw she hadto yield. I asked her to indorse me to these people, and thenleave me. It was not pleasant for her, but she took the pill;and even went further than I was meaning to require. I only wantedthe 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 itby the squirming of these rats. The queen's guards fell into line, and she and they marched away, with their torch-bearers, and wokethe echoes of the cavernous tunnels with the measured beat of theirretreating footfalls. I had the prisoner taken from the rack andplaced upon his bed, and medicaments applied to his hurts, andwine 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 jumpedback, the picture of fright, when I turned unconsciously towardher. It was pitiful to see. 

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

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

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

The man moved his head in sign of refusal. But the woman lookedpleased--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 shouldnot 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 stillimploring. Imploring what? The man's death? I could not quiteget 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 howthese 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 freeman and whole--he's not going to die. "

The man's white face lit up, and the woman flung herself at mein 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'sservant--Arthur, the king whose word is gold!"

"Well, then you do believe I can be trusted, after all. Whydidn'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 plainenough to even the dullest understanding that you had nothingto 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 himto do that for?"

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

"Well--yes, there is reason in that. But _he_ didn't want thequick 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 convictedman's estate and beggars his widow and his orphans. They couldtorture you to death, but without conviction or confession theycould 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 havebought him release from torture at cost to yourself of slowstarvation and death--well, it humbles a body to think what yoursex can do when it comes to self-sacrifice. I'll book you bothfor my colony; you'll like it there; it's a Factory where I'm goingto 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 wasa good, painstaking and paingiving official, --for surely it wasnot to his discredit that he performed his functions well--but topay him back for wantonly cuffing and otherwise distressing thatyoung woman. The priests told me about this, and were generouslyhot to have him punished. Something of this disagreeable sortwas turning up every now and then. I mean, episodes that showedthat not all priests were frauds and self-seekers, but that many, even the great majority, of these that were down on the groundamong the common people, were sincere and right-hearted, anddevoted to the alleviation of human troubles and sufferings. Well, it was a thing which could not be helped, so I seldom frettedabout it, and never many minutes at a time; it has never been myway to bother much about things which you can't cure. But I didnot like it, for it was just the sort of thing to keep peoplereconciled to an Established Church. We _must_ have a religion--it goes without saying--but my idea is, to have it cut up intoforty free sects, so that they will police each other, as had beenthe case in the United States in my time. Concentration of powerin a political machine is bad; and and an Established Church isonly a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, anddoes no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scatteredcondition. That wasn't law; it wasn't gospel: it was onlyan opinion--my opinion, and I was only a man, one man: so it wasn'tworth any more than the pope's--or any less, for that matter. 

Well, I couldn't rack the executioner, neither would I overlookthe just complaint of the priests. The man must be punishedsomehow or other, so I degraded him from his office and made himleader of the band--the new one that was to be started. He beggedhard, 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 foundshe was going to have neither Hugo's life nor his property. ButI told her she must bear this cross; that while by law and customshe certainly was entitled to both the man's life and his property, there were extenuating circumstances, and so in Arthur the king'sname 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 hehad carried it into the royal forest in the hope that that might makedetection of the misdoer impossible. Confound her, I couldn'tmake her see that sudden passion is an extenuating circumstancein the killing of venison--or of a person--so I gave it up and lether sulk it out. I _did_ think I was going to make her see it byremarking that her own sudden passion in the case of the pagemodified 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 iseverything; training is all there is _to_ a person. We speak ofnature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what wecall by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they aretransmitted to us, trained into us. All that is original in us, and therefore fairly creditable or discreditable to us, can becovered up and hidden by the point of a cambric needle, all therest being atoms contributed by, and inherited from, a processionof ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clamor grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tediouslyand ostentatiously and unprofitably developed. And as for me, all that I think about in this plodding sad pilgrimage, thispathetic drift between the eternities, is to look out and humblylive a pure and high and blameless life, and save that onemicroscopic atom in me that is truly _me_: the rest may land inSheol 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-laterpoint 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 andunassailed belief that the law which permitted her to kill a subjectwhen she chose was a perfectly right and righteous one. 

Well, we must give even Satan his due. She deserved a complimentfor one thing; and I tried to pay it, but the words stuck in mythroat. She had a right to kill the boy, but she was in no wiseobliged to pay for him. That was law for some other people, butnot for her. She knew quite well that she was doing a large andgenerous thing to pay for that lad, and that I ought in commonfairness to come out with something handsome about it, but Icouldn't--my mouth refused. I couldn't help seeing, in my fancy, that poor old grandma with the broken heart, and that fair youngcreature lying butchered, his little silken pomps and vanitieslaced with his golden blood. How could she _pay_ for him! _Whom_could she pay? And so, well knowing that this woman, trainedas she had been, deserved praise, even adulation, I was yet notable to utter it, trained as I had been. The best I could do wasto fish up a compliment from outside, so to speak--and the pityof 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 mastermight kill his slave for nothing--for mere spite, malice, orto pass the time--just as we have seen that the crowned head coulddo it with _his_ slave, that is to say, anybody. A gentleman couldkill a free commoner, and pay for him--cash or garden-truck. A noble could kill a noble without expense, as far as the law wasconcerned, but reprisals in kind were to be expected. _Any_bodycould kill _some_body, except the commoner and the slave; these hadno privileges. If they killed, it was murder, and the law wouldn'tstand murder. It made short work of the experimenter--and ofhis family, too, if he murdered somebody who belonged up amongthe ornamental ranks. If a commoner gave a noble even so muchas 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 tatterswith horses, and all the world came to see the show, and crackjokes, and have a good time; and some of the performances of thebest people present were as tough, and as properly unprintable, as any that have been printed by the pleasant Casanova in hischapter about the dismemberment of Louis XV's poor awkward enemy. 

I had had enough of this grisly place by this time, and wantedto leave, but I couldn't, because I had something on my mind thatmy 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 cannotbe said to pay, in the long run; it would be much better to haveless good and more comfort. Still, this is only my opinion, andI am only one man; others, with less experience, may thinkdifferently. They have a right to their view. I only standto this: I have noticed my conscience for many years, and I knowit is more trouble and bother to me than anything else I startedwith. I suppose that in the beginning I prized it, because weprize 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 hadan anvil in me would I prize it? Of course not. And yet when youcome to think, there is no real difference between a conscienceand an anvil--I mean for comfort. I have noticed it a thousandtimes. And you could dissolve an anvil with acids, when youcouldn't stand it any longer; but there isn't any way that you canwork off a conscience--at least so it will stay worked off; notthat I know of, anyway. 

There was something I wanted to do before leaving, but it wasa disagreeable matter, and I hated to go at it. Well, it botheredme 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 hadbeen active in his time, but his fire was out, this good while, he was only a stately ash-pile now; gentle enough, and kindlyenough for my purpose, without doubt, but not usable. He wasnothing, this so-called king: the queen was the only power there. And she was a Vesuvius. As a favor, she might consent to warma flock of sparrows for you, but then she might take that veryopportunity to turn herself loose and bury a city. However, I reflected that as often as any other way, when you are expectingthe 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 andamong neighboring castles, and with her permission I would liketo examine her collection, her bric-a-brac--that is to say, herprisoners. She resisted; but I was expecting that. But she finallyconsented. I was expecting that, too, but not so soon. That aboutended my discomfort. She called her guards and torches, andwe went down into the dungeons. These were down under the castle'sfoundations, and mainly were small cells hollowed out of the livingrock. Some of these cells had no light at all. In one of them wasa woman, in foul rags, who sat on the ground, and would not answera 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 thingit might be that was disturbing with sound and light the meaninglessdull dream that was become her life; after that, she sat bowed, with her dirt-caked fingers idly interlocked in her lap, and gaveno further sign. This poor rack of bones was a woman of middleage, apparently; but only apparently; she had been there nineyears, 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 saidlord she had refused what has since been called le droit duseigneur, and, moreover, had opposed violence to violence and spilthalf a gill of his almost sacred blood. The young husband hadinterfered at that point, believing the bride's life in danger, and had flung the noble out into the midst of the humble andtrembling wedding guests, in the parlor, and left him thereastonished at this strange treatment, and implacably embitteredagainst both bride and groom. The said lord being cramped fordungeon-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 neverseen each other since. Here they were, kenneled like toads in thesame rock; they had passed nine pitch dark years within fifty feetof each other, yet neither knew whether the other was alive or not. All the first years, their only question had been--asked withbeseechings 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 wasnot asked any more--or any other. 

I wanted to see the man, after hearing all this. He was thirty-fouryears old, and looked sixty. He sat upon a squared block ofstone, with his head bent down, his forearms resting on his knees, his long hair hanging like a fringe before his face, and he wasmuttering to himself. He raised his chin and looked us slowlyover, in a listless dull way, blinking with the distress of thetorchlight, then dropped his head and fell to muttering againand took no further notice of us. There were some patheticallysuggestive dumb witnesses present. On his wrists and ankles werecicatrices, old smooth scars, and fastened to the stone on whichhe sat was a chain with manacles and fetters attached; but thisapparatus lay idle on the ground, and was thick with rust. Chainscease 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 voicelike no other voice, and a freshness, and lithe young grace, andbeauty, that belonged properly to the creatures of dreams--as hethought--and to no other. The sight of her would set his stagnantblood leaping; the sight of her--

But it was a disappointment. They sat together on the ground andlooked dimly wondering into each other's faces a while, with asort of weak animal curiosity; then forgot each other's presence, and dropped their eyes, and you saw that they were away again andwandering in some far land of dreams and shadows that we knownothing about. 

I had them taken out and sent to their friends. The queen did notlike 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 himso 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 killedanother lord, a sort of kinsman of the queen. That other lordhad ambushed him to assassinate him, but this fellow had got thebest of him and cut his throat. However, it was not for that thatI left him jailed, but for maliciously destroying the only publicwell in one of his wretched villages. The queen was bound to hanghim for killing her kinsman, but I would not allow it: it was nocrime to kill an assassin. But I said I was willing to let herhang him for destroying the well; so she concluded to put up withthat, as it was better than nothing. 

Dear me, for what trifling offenses the most of those forty-sevenmen and women were shut up there! Indeed, some were there forno 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 newestprisoner's crime was a mere remark which he had made. He saidhe believed that men were about all alike, and one man as goodas another, barring clothes. He said he believed that if you wereto strip the nation naked and send a stranger through the crowd, hecouldn't tell the king from a quack doctor, nor a duke from a hotelclerk. Apparently here was a man whose brains had not been reducedto an ineffectual mush by idiotic training. I set him loose andsent him to the Factory. 

Some of the cells carved in the living rock were just behind theface of the precipice, and in each of these an arrow-slit had beenpierced outward to the daylight, and so the captive had a thinray from the blessed sun for his comfort. The case of one ofthese poor fellows was particularly hard. From his dusky swallow'shole high up in that vast wall of native rock he could peer outthrough the arrow-slit and see his own home off yonder in thevalley; and for twenty-two years he had watched it, with heartacheand longing, through that crack. He could see the lights shinethere at night, and in the daytime he could see figures go in andcome out--his wife and children, some of them, no doubt, thoughhe could not make out at that distance. In the course of yearshe noted festivities there, and tried to rejoice, and wonderedif they were weddings or what they might be. And he noted funerals;and they wrung his heart. He could make out the coffin, but hecould not determine its size, and so could not tell whether it waswife or child. He could see the procession form, with priestsand mourners, and move solemnly away, bearing the secret withthem. He had left behind him five children and a wife; and innineteen years he had seen five funerals issue, and none of themhumble enough in pomp to denote a servant. So he had lost fiveof his treasures; there must still be one remaining--one nowinfinitely, 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, andhalf a ray of light, when you are in a dungeon, is a great supportto the body and preserver of the intellect. This man was in prettygood condition yet. By the time he had finished telling me hisdistressful tale, I was in the same state of mind that you wouldhave 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 whichmember of the family it was that was left. So I took him overhome myself; and an amazing kind of a surprise party it was, too--typhoons and cyclones of frantic joy, and whole Niagaras of happytears; and by George! we found the aforetime young matron grayingtoward the imminent verge of her half century, and the babies allmen and women, and some of them married and experimenting familywisethemselves--for not a soul of the tribe was dead! Conceive of theingenious devilishness of that queen: she had a special hatred forthis prisoner, and she had _invented_ all those funerals herself, to scorch his heart with; and the sublimest stroke of genius ofthe 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 himwith her whole heart, and she never would have softened toward him. And yet his crime was committed more in thoughtlessness thandeliberate depravity. He had said she had red hair. Well, shehad; but that was no way to speak of it. When red-headed peopleare above a certain social grade their hair is auburn. 

Consider it: among these forty-seven captives there were fivewhose names, offenses, and dates of incarceration were no longerknown! One woman and four men--all bent, and wrinkled, andmind-extinguished patriarchs. They themselves had long ago forgottenthese details; at any rate they had mere vague theories about them, nothing definite and nothing that they repeated twice in the sameway. The succession of priests whose office it had been to praydaily with the captives and remind them that God had put themthere, for some wise purpose or other, and teach them that patience, humbleness, and submission to oppression was what He loved to seein parties of a subordinate rank, had traditions about these poorold human ruins, but nothing more. These traditions went butlittle way, for they concerned the length of the incarceration only, and not the names of the offenses. And even by the help oftradition the only thing that could be proven was that none ofthe five had seen daylight for thirty-five years: how much longerthis privation has lasted was not guessable. The king and the queenknew nothing about these poor creatures, except that they wereheirlooms, assets inherited, along with the throne, from the formerfirm. Nothing of their history had been transmitted with theirpersons, and so the inheriting owners had considered them of novalue, 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, thething had never come up in her mind. So here she was, forecastingthe veritable history of future prisoners of the Castle d'If, without knowing it. It seemed plain to me now, that with hertraining, those inherited prisoners were merely property--nothingmore, nothing less. Well, when we inherit property, it does notoccur 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 worldand the glare of the afternoon sun--previously blindfolding them, in charity for eyes so long untortured by light--they were aspectacle to look at. Skeletons, scarecrows, goblins, patheticfrights, every one; legitimatest possible children of Monarchyby 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 theydon't know the meaning of a new big word. The more ignorant theyare, the more pitifully certain they are to pretend you haven'tshot over their heads. The queen was just one of that sort, andwas always making the stupidest blunders by reason of it. Shehesitated a moment; then her face brightened up with suddencomprehension, 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, shewas moving on the procession with an axe!

Well, she certainly was a curious one, was Morgan le Fay. I haveseen a good many kinds of women in my time, but she laid over themall for variety. And how sharply characteristic of her this episodewas. She had no more idea than a horse of how to photographa procession; but being in doubt, it was just like her to tryto 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 lusciousbarrels-ful of the blessed God's untainted, dew-fashioned, woodland-scented air once more, after suffocating body and mind for twodays and nights in the moral and physical stenches of that intolerableold buzzard-roost! I mean, for me: of course the place was allright and agreeable enough for Sandy, for she had been used tohigh 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 shehad stood by me most helpfully in the castle, and had mightilysupported and reinforced me with gigantic foolishnesses which wereworth more for the occasion than wisdoms double their size; soI 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 thirtywinter of age southward--"

"Are you going to see if you can work up another half-stretch onthe 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, andI will load my pipe and give good attention. "

"Now turn we unto Sir Marhaus that rode with the damsel of thirtywinter 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 dukeof South Marches, and there they asked harbour. And on the mornthe duke sent unto Sir Marhaus, and bad him make him ready. Andso Sir Marhaus arose and armed him, and there was a mass sungafore him, and he brake his fast, and so mounted on horseback inthe court of the castle, there they should do the battle. So therewas the duke already on horseback, clean armed, and his six sonsby him, and every each had a spear in his hand, and so theyencountered, whereas the duke and his two sons brake their spearsupon him, but Sir Marhaus held up his spear and touched none ofthem. Then came the four sons by couples, and two of them braketheir spears, and so did the other two. And all this whileSir 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, andbad the duke yield him or else he would slay him. And then someof his sons recovered, and would have set upon Sir Marhaus. ThenSir Marhaus said to the duke, Cease thy sons, or else I will dothe uttermost to you all. When the duke saw he might not escapethe death, he cried to his sons, and charged them to yield themto Sir Marhaus. And they kneeled all down and put the pommelsof their swords to the knight, and so he received them. And thenthey holp up their father, and so by their common assent promisedunto Sir Marhaus never to be foes unto King Arthur, and thereuponat Whitsuntide after, to come he and his sons, and put them inthe king's grace. *

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

"Even so standeth the history, fair Sir Boss. Now ye shall witthat that very duke and his six sons are they whom but few dayspast 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? Onewhole duke and six dukelets; why, Sandy, it was an elegant haul. Knight-errantry is a most chuckle-headed trade, and it is tedioushard 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 itas a business, for I wouldn't. No sound and legitimate businesscan be established on a basis of speculation. A successful whirlin the knight-errantry line--now what is it when you blow awaythe nonsense and come down to the cold facts? It's just a cornerin 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 yourbucket-shop; ain't that so, Sandy?"

"Whethersoever it be that my mind miscarrieth, bewraying simplelanguage in such sort that the words do seem to come endlongand overthwart--"

"There's no use in beating about the bush and trying to get aroundit 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-errantryis _worse_ than pork; for whatever happens, the pork's left, andso somebody's benefited anyway; but when the market breaks, in aknight-errantry whirl, and every knight in the pool passes in hischecks, what have you got for assets? Just a rubbish-pile ofbattered corpses and a barrel or two of busted hardware. Can youcall _those_ assets? Give me pork, every time. Am I right?"

"Ah, peradventure my head being distraught by the manifold matterswhereunto the confusions of these but late adventured haps andfortunings 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 asit goes, but you don't know business; that's where the troubleis. It unfits you to argue about business, and you're wrongto be always trying. However, that aside, it was a good haul, anyway, and will breed a handsome crop of reputation in Arthur'scourt. And speaking of the cowboys, what a curious country thisis 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, andhere is this old duke of the South Marches still slashing away withsword and lance at his time of life, after raising such a familyas he has raised. As I understand it, Sir Gawaine killed sevenof his sons, and still he had six left for Sir Marhaus and me totake into camp. And then there was that damsel of sixty winterof age still excursioning around in her frosty bloom--How oldare you, Sandy?"

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

CHAPTER XX

THE OGRE'S CASTLE

Between six and nine we made ten miles, which was plenty for ahorse carrying triple--man, woman, and armor; then we stoppedfor a long nooning under some trees by a limpid brook. 

Right so came by and by a knight riding; and as he drew near hemade dolorous moan, and by the words of it I perceived that hewas cursing and swearing; yet nevertheless was I glad of hiscoming, for that I saw he bore a bulletin-board whereon in lettersall 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 forknight of mine. It was Sir Madok de la Montaine, a burly greatfellow whose chief distinction was that he had come within an aceof sending Sir Launcelot down over his horse-tail once. He wasnever long in a stranger's presence without finding some pretextor other to let out that great fact. But there was another factof nearly the same size, which he never pushed upon anybody unasked, and yet never withheld when asked: that was, that the reason hedidn't quite succeed was, that he was interrupted and sent downover horse-tail himself. This innocent vast lubber did not seeany particular difference between the two facts. I liked him, for he was earnest in his work, and very valuable. And he was sofine to look at, with his broad mailed shoulders, and the grandleonine set of his plumed head, and his big shield with its quaintdevice of a gauntleted hand clutching a prophylactic tooth-brush, with motto: "Try Noyoudont. " This was a tooth-wash that I wasintroducing. 

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

Sir Madok was very bitter, and brake out anew with cursings. Hesaid he had cursed his soul to rags; and yet he would not get downfrom his horse, neither would he take any rest, or listen to anycomfort, until he should have found Sir Ossaise and settled thisaccount. It appeared, by what I could piece together of theunprofane fragments of his statement, that he had chanced uponSir Ossaise at dawn of the morning, and been told that if he wouldmake a short cut across the fields and swamps and broken hills andglades, he could head off a company of travelers who would be rarecustomers for prophylactics and tooth-wash. With characteristiczeal Sir Madok had plunged away at once upon this quest, and afterthree hours of awful crosslot riding had overhauled his game. Andbehold, it was the five patriarchs that had been released from thedungeons the evening before! Poor old creatures, it was all oftwenty years since any one of them had known what it was to beequipped with any remaining snag or remnant of a tooth. 

"Blank-blank-blank him, " said Sir Madok, "an I do not stove-polishhim an I may find him, leave it to me; for never no knight thathight Ossaise or aught else may do me this disservice and bideon live, an I may find him, the which I have thereunto sworn agreat oath this day. "

And with these words and others, he lightly took his spear andgat him thence. In the middle of the afternoon we came upon oneof those very patriarchs ourselves, in the edge of a poor village. He was basking in the love of relatives and friends whom he had notseen for fifty years; and about him and caressing him were alsodescendants 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 mindwas stagnant. It seemed incredible that a man could outlast halfa century shut up in a dark hole like a rat, but here were his oldwife and some old comrades to testify to it. They could rememberhim as he was in the freshness and strength of his young manhood, when he kissed his child and delivered it to its mother's handsand went away into that long oblivion. The people at the castlecould not tell within half a generation the length of time the manhad been shut up there for his unrecorded and forgotten offense;but this old wife knew; and so did her old child, who stood thereamong her married sons and daughters trying to realize a fatherwho had been to her a name, a thought, a formless image, a tradition, all her life, and now was suddenly concreted into actual fleshand blood and set before her face. 

It was a curious situation; yet it is not on that account thatI have made room for it here, but on account of a thing whichseemed to me still more curious. To wit, that this dreadful matterbrought from these downtrodden people no outburst of rage againstthese oppressors. They had been heritors and subjects of crueltyand outrage so long that nothing could have startled them buta kindness. Yes, here was a curious revelation, indeed, of thedepth to which this people had been sunk in slavery. Their entirebeing was reduced to a monotonous dead level of patience, resignation, dumb uncomplaining acceptance of whatever might befall them inthis life. Their very imagination was dead. When you can saythat of a man, he has struck bottom, I reckon; there is no lowerdeep for him. 

I rather wished I had gone some other road. This was not the sortof experience for a statesman to encounter who was planning outa peaceful revolution in his mind. For it could not help bringingup the unget-aroundable fact that, all gentle cant and philosophizingto the contrary notwithstanding, no people in the world ever didachieve 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 teachesanything, it teaches that. What this folk needed, then, was aReign of Terror and a guillotine, and I was the wrong man for them. 

Two days later, toward noon, Sandy began to show signs of excitementand feverish expectancy. She said we were approaching the ogre'scastle. I was surprised into an uncomfortable shock. The objectof our quest had gradually dropped out of my mind; this suddenresurrection of it made it seem quite a real and startling thingfor a moment, and roused up in me a smart interest. Sandy'sexcitement increased every moment; and so did mine, for that sortof thing is catching. My heart got to thumping. You can't reasonwith your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things whichthe intellect scorns. Presently, when Sandy slid from the horse, motioned me to stop, and went creeping stealthily, with her headbent nearly to her knees, toward a row of bushes that bordereda declivity, the thumpings grew stronger and quicker. And theykept it up while she was gaining her ambush and getting her glimpseover the declivity; and also while I was creeping to her side onmy knees. Her eyes were burning now, as she pointed with herfinger, 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 wattledfence around it. "

She looked surprised and distressed. The animation faded out ofher face; and during many moments she was lost in thought andsilent. 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 baseand shameful aspect; yet to the perception of the other it is notenchanted, hath suffered no change, but stands firm and statelystill, girt with its moat and waving its banners in the blue airfrom its towers. And God shield us, how it pricks the heart tosee again these gracious captives, and the sorrow deepened in theirsweet faces! We have tarried along, and are to blame. "

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

"This is a common case--the enchanting of a thing to one eye andleaving it in its proper form to another. You have heard of itbefore, Sandy, though you haven't happened to experience it. But no harm is done. In fact, it is lucky the way it is. If theseladies were hogs to everybody and to themselves, it would benecessary to break the enchantment, and that might be impossibleif one failed to find out the particular process of the enchantment. And hazardous, too; for in attempting a disenchantment without thetrue 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 byreducing your materials to nothing finally, or to an odorless gaswhich you can't follow--which, of course, amounts to the samething. But here, by good luck, no one's eyes but mine are underthe enchantment, and so it is of no consequence to dissolve it. These ladies remain ladies to you, and to themselves, and toeverybody else; and at the same time they will suffer in no wayfrom my delusion, for when I know that an ostensible hog is alady, that is enough for me, I know how to treat her. "

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

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

"The ogres, Are _they_ changed also? It is most wonderful. Nowam I fearful; for how canst thou strike with sure aim when five oftheir 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 ogreis invisible; then I know how to locate his vitals. Don't you beafraid, I will make short work of these bunco-steerers. Staywhere 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 theswine-herds. I won their gratitude by buying out all the hogsat the lump sum of sixteen pennies, which was rather above latestquotations. I was just in time; for the Church, the lord of themanor, and the rest of the tax-gatherers would have been alongnext day and swept off pretty much all the stock, leaving theswine-herds very short of hogs and Sandy out of princesses. Butnow the tax people could be paid in cash, and there would bea stake left besides. One of the men had ten children; and hesaid that last year when a priest came and of his ten pigs tookthe fattest one for tithes, the wife burst out upon him, and offeredhim a child and said:

"Thou beast without bowels of mercy, why leave me my child, yetrob 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 manyto have changed its nature when it changed its disguise. 

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

We had to drive those hogs home--ten miles; and no ladies wereever more fickle-minded or contrary. They would stay in no road, no path; they broke out through the brush on all sides, and flowedaway in all directions, over rocks, and hills, and the roughestplaces they could find. And they must not be struck, or roughlyaccosted; Sandy could not bear to see them treated in ways unbecomingtheir rank. The troublesomest old sow of the lot had to be calledmy Lady, and your Highness, like the rest. It is annoying anddifficult to scour around after hogs, in armor. There was onesmall countess, with an iron ring in her snout and hardly any hairon her back, that was the devil for perversity. She gave me a raceof an hour, over all sorts of country, and then we were right wherewe 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 thelast degree indelicate to drag a countess by her train. 

We got the hogs home just at dark--most of them. The princessNerovens 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 starin her forehead, and the latter a brown one with thin legs and aslight limp in the forward shank on the starboard side--a coupleof the tryingest blisters to drive that I ever saw. Also amongthe missing were several mere baronesses--and I wanted them tostay missing; but no, all that sausage-meat had to be found; soservants were sent out with torches to scour the woods and hillsto that end. 

Of course, the whole drove was housed in the house, and, greatguns!--well, I never saw anything like it. Nor ever heard anythinglike it. And never smelt anything like it. It was like aninsurrection in a gasometer. 

CHAPTER XXI

THE PILGRIMS

When I did get to bed at last I was unspeakably tired; the stretchingout, and the relaxing of the long-tense muscles, how luxurious, how delicious! but that was as far as I could get--sleep was out ofthe question for the present. The ripping and tearing and squealingof the nobility up and down the halls and corridors was pandemoniumcome again, and kept me broad awake. Being awake, my thoughtswere busy, of course; and mainly they busied themselves with Sandy'scurious delusion. Here she was, as sane a person as the kingdomcould produce; and yet, from my point of view she was acting likea crazy woman. My land, the power of training! of influence!of education! It can bring a body up to believe anything. I hadto put myself in Sandy's place to realize that she was not alunatic. Yes, and put her in mine, to demonstrate how easy it isto seem a lunatic to a person who has not been taught as you havebeen taught. If I had told Sandy I had seen a wagon, uninfluencedby enchantment, spin along fifty miles an hour; had seen a man, unequipped with magic powers, get into a basket and soar out ofsight among the clouds; and had listened, without any necromancer'shelp, to the conversation of a person who was several hundred milesaway, Sandy would not merely have supposed me to be crazy, shewould have thought she knew it. Everybody around her believed inenchantments; nobody had any doubts; to doubt that a castle couldbe turned into a sty, and its occupants into hogs, would have beenthe same as my doubting among Connecticut people the actualityof the telephone and its wonders, --and in both cases would beabsolute proof of a diseased mind, an unsettled reason. Yes, Sandywas sane; that must be admitted. If I also would be sane--to Sandy--I must keep my superstitions about unenchanted and unmiraculouslocomotives, balloons, and telephones, to myself. Also, I believedthat the world was not flat, and hadn't pillars under it to supportit, nor a canopy over it to turn off a universe of water thatoccupied all space above; but as I was the only person in the kingdomafflicted with such impious and criminal opinions, I recognizedthat it would be good wisdom to keep quiet about this matter, too, if I did not wish to be suddenly shunned and forsaken by everybodyas a madman. 

The next morning Sandy assembled the swine in the dining-room andgave them their breakfast, waiting upon them personally andmanifesting in every way the deep reverence which the natives ofher island, ancient and modern, have always felt for rank, let itsoutward casket and the mental and moral contents be what they may. I could have eaten with the hogs if I had had birth approaching mylofty official rank; but I hadn't, and so accepted the unavoidableslight and made no complaint. Sandy and I had our breakfast atthe 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. Theeffrontery of it is beyond admiration. We blandly march intoa man's house, and cram it full of the only really valuable nobilitythe sun has yet discovered in the earth, and then it turns outthat we don't even know the man's name. How did you ever ventureto take this extravagant liberty? I supposed, of course, it wasyour 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 twicein his life to entertain company such as we have brought to gracehis house withal?"

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

"Then let him be thankful, and manifest the same by grateful speechand due humility; he were a dog, else, and the heir and ancestorof 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 togetherand 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 thesejourneys in one so brief life as He hath appointed that createdlife, and thereto death likewise with help of Adam, who by sindone through persuasion of his helpmeet, she being wrought uponand bewrayed by the beguilements of the great enemy of man, thatserpent hight Satan, aforetime consecrated and set apart unto thatevil work by overmastering spite and envy begotten in his heartthrough fell ambitions that did blight and mildew a nature erstso white and pure whenso it hove with the shining multitudesits brethren-born in glade and shade of that fair heaven whereinall 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'tyou see, we could distribute these people around the earth in lesstime than it is going to take you to explain that we can't. Wemustn't talk now, we must act. You want to be careful; you mustn'tlet 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 thearistocracy home?"

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

This was lightning from a clear sky, for unexpectedness; and therelief of it was like pardon to a prisoner. She would remain todeliver the goods, of course. 

"Well, then, Sandy, as our enterprise is handsomely and successfullyended, 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 fieldsome 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 wellmake 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 thatwhole peerage away to the servants. And I asked them to takea duster and dust around a little where the nobilities had mainlylodged and promenaded; but they considered that that would behardly worth while, and would moreover be a rather grave departurefrom custom, and therefore likely to make talk. A departure fromcustom--that settled it; it was a nation capable of committing anycrime but that. The servants said they would follow the fashion, a fashion grown sacred through immemorial observance; they wouldscatter fresh rushes in all the rooms and halls, and then theevidence 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 ina stratified record; and the antiquary could dig through it andtell by the remains of each period what changes of diet the familyhad 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 itwas hourly being borne in upon me now, that if I would governthis 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 ithad in it a sample of about all the upper occupations and professionsthe 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, andthere was not a side-saddle in the party; for this specialty wasto remain unknown in England for nine hundred years yet. 

It was a pleasant, friendly, sociable herd; pious, happy, merry andfull of unconscious coarsenesses and innocent indecencies. Whatthey regarded as the merry tale went the continual round and causedno more embarrassment than it would have caused in the best Englishsociety twelve centuries later. Practical jokes worthy of theEnglish wits of the first quarter of the far-off nineteenth centurywere sprung here and there and yonder along the line, and compelledthe delightedest applause; and sometimes when a bright remark wasmade at one end of the procession and started on its travels towardthe other, you could note its progress all the way by the sparklingspray 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 postedme. She said:

"They journey to the Valley of Holiness, for to be blessed of thegodly hermits and drink of the miraculous waters and be cleansedfrom sin. "

"Where is this watering place?"

"It lieth a two-day journey hence, by the borders of the land thathight 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 therelived there an abbot and his monks. Belike were none in the worldmore holy than these; for they gave themselves to study of piousbooks, and spoke not the one to the other, or indeed to any, andate decayed herbs and naught thereto, and slept hard, and prayedmuch, and washed never; also they wore the same garment until itfell from their bodies through age and decay. Right so came theyto 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 clearwater burst forth by miracle in a desert place. Now were thefickle monks tempted of the Fiend, and they wrought with theirabbot unceasingly by beggings and beseechings that he would constructa 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 whichHe loveth, and wanton with such as be worldly and an offense. These monks did enter into the bath and come thence washed aswhite as snow; and lo, in that moment His sign appeared, inmiraculous rebuke! for His insulted waters ceased to flow, andutterly vanished away. "

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

"Belike; but it was their first sin; and they had been of perfectlife for long, and differing in naught from the angels. Prayers, tears, torturings of the flesh, all was vain to beguile that waterto flow again. Even processions; even burnt-offerings; even votivecandles to the Virgin, did fail every each of them; and all inthe 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 humblesurrender and destroyed the bath. And behold, His anger was in thatmoment appeased, and the waters gushed richly forth again, and evenunto 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, andswiftly would he need it, too. "

"The community has prospered since?"

"Even from that very day. The fame of the miracle went abroadinto all lands. From every land came monks to join; they cameeven as the fishes come, in shoals; and the monastery added buildingto building, and yet others to these, and so spread wide its armsand took them in. And nuns came, also; and more again, and yetmore; and built over against the monastery on the yon side of thevale, and added building to building, until mighty was that nunnery. And these were friendly unto those, and they joined their lovinglabors together, and together they built a fair great foundlingasylum midway of the valley between. "

"You spoke of some hermits, Sandy. "

"These have gathered there from the ends of the earth. A hermitthriveth best where there be multitudes of pilgrims. Ye shall notfind no hermit of no sort wanting. If any shall mention a hermitof a kind he thinketh new and not to be found but in some farstrange land, let him but scratch among the holes and caves andswamps that line that Valley of Holiness, and whatsoever be hisbreed, it skills not, he shall find a sample of it there. "

I closed up alongside of a burly fellow with a fat good-humoredface, purposing to make myself agreeable and pick up some furthercrumbs of fact; but I had hardly more than scraped acquaintancewith him when he began eagerly and awkwardly to lead up, in theimmemorial way, to that same old anecdote--the one Sir Dinadantold me, what time I got into trouble with Sir Sagramor and waschallenged of him on account of it. I excused myself and droppedto the rear of the procession, sad at heart, willing to go hencefrom this troubled life, this vale of tears, this brief day ofbroken rest, of cloud and storm, of weary struggle and monotonousdefeat; and yet shrinking from the change, as remembering how longeternity 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 playfulways, nor any happy giddiness, whether of youth or age. Yet bothwere here, both age and youth; gray old men and women, strong menand women of middle age, young husbands, young wives, little boysand girls, and three babies at the breast. Even the children weresmileless; there was not a face among all these half a hundredpeople but was cast down, and bore that set expression of hopelessnesswhich is bred of long and hard trials and old acquaintance withdespair. They were slaves. Chains led from their fettered feetand their manacled hands to a sole-leather belt about their waists;and all except the children were also linked together in a filesix feet apart, by a single chain which led from collar to collarall down the line. They were on foot, and had tramped threehundred miles in eighteen days, upon the cheapest odds and endsof food, and stingy rations of that. They had slept in thesechains every night, bundled together like swine. They had upontheir bodies some poor rags, but they could not be said to beclothed. Their irons had chafed the skin from their ankles andmade sores which were ulcerated and wormy. Their naked feet weretorn, and none walked without a limp. Originally there had been ahundred of these unfortunates, but about half had been sold onthe trip. The trader in charge of them rode a horse and carrieda whip with a short handle and a long heavy lash divided intoseveral knotted tails at the end. With this whip he cut theshoulders of any that tottered from weariness and pain, andstraightened them up. He did not speak; the whip conveyed hisdesire without that. None of these poor creatures looked up aswe rode along by; they showed no consciousness of our presence. And they made no sound but one; that was the dull and awful clankof their chains from end to end of the long file, as forty-threeburdened feet rose and fell in unison. The file moved in a cloudof its own making. 

All these faces were gray with a coating of dust. One has seenthe like of this coating upon furniture in unoccupied houses, andhas written his idle thought in it with his finger. I was remindedof this when I noticed the faces of some of those women, youngmothers carrying babes that were near to death and freedom, howa something in their hearts was written in the dust upon theirfaces, plain to see, and lord, how plain to read! for it was thetrack of tears. One of these young mothers was but a girl, andit hurt me to the heart to read that writing, and reflect that itwas come up out of the breast of such a child, a breast that oughtnot to know trouble yet, but only the gladness of the morning oflife; and no doubt--

She reeled just then, giddy with fatigue, and down came the lashand flicked a flake of skin from her naked shoulder. It stung meas if I had been hit instead. The master halted the file andjumped from his horse. He stormed and swore at this girl, andsaid she had made annoyance enough with her laziness, and as thiswas 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 gaveno attention. He snatched the child from her, and then made themen-slaves who were chained before and behind her throw her onthe ground and hold her there and expose her body; and then helaid on with his lash like a madman till her back was flayed, sheshrieking and struggling the while piteously. One of the men whowas holding her turned away his face, and for this humanity he wasreviled and flogged. 

All our pilgrims looked on and commented--on the expert way inwhich the whip was handled. They were too much hardened by lifelongeveryday familiarity with slavery to notice that there was anythingelse in the exhibition that invited comment. This was what slaverycould do, in the way of ossifying what one may call the superiorlobe 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 thatwould not do. I must not interfere too much and get myself a namefor riding over the country's laws and the citizen's rightsroughshod. If I lived and prospered I would be the death ofslavery, that I was resolved upon; but I would try to fix it sothat when I became its executioner it should be by command ofthe nation. 

Just here was the wayside shop of a smith; and now arrived a landedproprietor who had bought this girl a few miles back, deliverablehere where her irons could be taken off. They were removed; thenthere was a squabble between the gentleman and the dealer as towhich should pay the blacksmith. The moment the girl was deliveredfrom her irons, she flung herself, all tears and frantic sobbings, into the arms of the slave who had turned away his face when shewas whipped. He strained her to his breast, and smothered herface and the child's with kisses, and washed them with the rainof his tears. I suspected. I inquired. Yes, I was right; it washusband and wife. They had to be torn apart by force; the girlhad to be dragged away, and she struggled and fought and shriekedlike one gone mad till a turn of the road hid her from sight; andeven after that, we could still make out the fading plaint of thosereceding shrieks. And the husband and father, with his wife andchild gone, never to be seen by him again in life?--well, the lookof him one might not bear at all, and so I turned away; but I knewI should never get his picture out of my mind again, and thereit 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 whenI rose next morning and looked abroad, I was ware where a knightcame riding in the golden glory of the new day, and recognized himfor knight of mine--Sir Ozana le Cure Hardy. He was in thegentlemen's furnishing line, and his missionarying specialty wasplug hats. He was clothed all in steel, in the beautifulest armorof the time--up to where his helmet ought to have been; but hehadn't any helmet, he wore a shiny stove-pipe hat, and was ridiculousa spectacle as one might want to see. It was another of mysurreptitious schemes for extinguishing knighthood by making itgrotesque and absurd. Sir Ozana's saddle was hung about withleather hat boxes, and every time he overcame a wandering knighthe swore him into my service and fitted him with a plug and madehim wear it. I dressed and ran down to welcome Sir Ozana andget his news. 

"How is trade?" I asked. 

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

"Why, you have certainly done nobly, Sir Ozana. Where have youbeen 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 stirringin 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 lightlyto the stable and do even as I bid.... Sir, it is parlous newsI bring, and--be these pilgrims? Then ye may not do better, goodfolk, than gather and hear the tale I have to tell, sith itconcerneth 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 myword, and my word and message being these, namely: That a haphas happened whereof the like has not been seen no more but oncethis two hundred years, which was the first and last time thatthat said misfortune strake the holy valley in that form bycommandment of the Most High whereto by reasons just and causesthereunto contributing, wherein the matter--"

"The miraculous fount hath ceased to flow!" This shout burst fromtwenty 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 besome 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 sackclothand ashes, and the holy processions, none of these have ceasednor night nor day; and so the monks and the nuns and the foundlingsbe all exhausted, and do hang up prayers writ upon parchment, sith that no strength is left in man to lift up voice. And at lastthey sent for thee, Sir Boss, to try magic and enchantment; andif you could not come, then was the messenger to fetch Merlin, and he is there these three days now, and saith he will fetch thatwater though he burst the globe and wreck its kingdoms to accomplishit; and right bravely doth he work his magic and call upon hishellions to hie them hither and help, but not a whiff of moisturehath he started yet, even so much as might qualify as mist upona copper mirror an ye count not the barrel of sweat he sweatethbetwixt 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 Ozanathese words which I had written on the inside of his hat: "ChemicalDepartment, Laboratory extension, Section G. Pxxp. Send two offirst size, two of No. 3, and six of No. 4, together with the propercomplementary details--and two of my trained assistants. " And I said:

"Now get you to Camelot as fast as you can fly, brave knight, andshow the writing to Clarence, and tell him to have these requiredmatters 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 acteddifferently. They had come a long and difficult journey, and nowwhen the journey was nearly finished, and they learned that the mainthing they had come for had ceased to exist, they didn't do ashorses or cats or angle-worms would probably have done--turn backand get at something profitable--no, anxious as they had beforebeen to see the miraculous fountain, they were as much as fortytimes 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 stoodupon the high confines of the Valley of Holiness, and our eyesswept it from end to end and noted its features. That is, itslarge features. These were the three masses of buildings. Theywere distant and isolated temporalities shrunken to toy constructionsin the lonely waste of what seemed a desert--and was. Such a sceneis always mournful, it is so impressively still, and looks sosteeped in death. But there was a sound here which interruptedthe stillness only to add to its mournfulness; this was the faintfar sound of tolling bells which floated fitfully to us on thepassing breeze, and so faintly, so softly, that we hardly knewwhether we heard it with our ears or with our spirits. 

We reached the monastery before dark, and there the males weregiven lodging, but the women were sent over to the nunnery. Thebells were close at hand now, and their solemn booming smoteupon the ear like a message of doom. A superstitious despairpossessed the heart of every monk and published itself in hisghastly 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; buthe did the shedding himself. He said:

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

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

"Ah, he said he would, my son, he said he would, and took oathto 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 beprofessional courtesy. Two of a trade must not underbid eachother. We might as well cut rates and be done with it; it wouldarrive at that in the end. Merlin has the contract; no othermagician can touch it till he throws it up. "

"But I will take it from him; it is a terrible emergency and theact is thereby justified. And if it were not so, who will givelaw to the Church? The Church giveth law to all; and what shewills to do, that she may do, hurt whom it may. I will take itfrom him; you shall begin upon the moment. "

"It may not be, Father. No doubt, as you say, where power issupreme, one can do as one likes and suffer no injury; but we poormagicians are not so situated. Merlin is a very good magicianin a small way, and has quite a neat provincial reputation. Heis struggling along, doing the best he can, and it would not beetiquette 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 werepersuaded against his will, he would load that well with a maliciousenchantment which would balk me until I found out its secret. It might take a month. I could set up a little enchantment ofmine which I call the telephone, and he could not find out itssecret in a hundred years. Yes, you perceive, he might block mefor 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 itthy 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 thusthe thing that is called rest, the prone body making outward signof repose where inwardly is none. "

Of course, it would have been best, all round, for Merlin to waiveetiquette and quit and call it half a day, since he would never beable 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 hisreputation, always had the luck to be performed when nobody butMerlin was present; he couldn't start this well with all this crowdaround to see; a crowd was as bad for a magician's miracle inthat day as it was for a spiritualist's miracle in mine; there wassure to be some skeptic on hand to turn up the gas at the crucialmoment and spoil everything. But I did not want Merlin to retirefrom the job until I was ready to take hold of it effectivelymyself; 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 timein ten days. As soon as their stomachs had been properly reinforcedwith food, their spirits began to rise fast; when the mead began togo 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 westayed by the board and put it through on that line. Matters gotto be very jolly. Good old questionable stories were told that madethe tears run down and cavernous mouths stand wide and the roundbellies shake with laughter; and questionable songs were bellowed outin 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 doesnot, as a rule, dissolve upon the early applications of a humorousthing; 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 twelfthrepetition they fell apart in chunks; and at the fifteenth theydisintegrated, and I got a broom and swept them up. This languageis figurative. Those islanders--well, they are slow pay at first, in the matter of return for your investment of effort, but in the endthey make the pay of all other nations poor and small by contrast. 

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

Matters were about as I expected to find them. The "fountain" wasan ordinary well, it had been dug in the ordinary way, and stoned upin the ordinary way. There was no miracle about it. Even the liethat had created its reputation was not miraculous; I could havetold it myself, with one hand tied behind me. The well was in adark chamber which stood in the center of a cut-stone chapel, whosewalls were hung with pious pictures of a workmanship that wouldhave made a chromo feel good; pictures historically commemorativeof curative miracles which had been achieved by the waters whennobody was looking. That is, nobody but angels; they are alwayson deck when there is a miracle to the fore--so as to get put inthe 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 drawnwith a windlass and chain by monks, and poured into troughs whichdelivered it into stone reservoirs outside in the chapel--whenthere was water to draw, I mean--and none but monks could enterthe well-chamber. I entered it, for I had temporary authorityto 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 usedhis eyes, instead of his disordered mind, he could have curedthe well by natural means, and then turned it into a miracle inthe customary way; but no, he was an old numskull, a magician whobelieved in his own magic; and no magician can thrive who ishandicapped with a superstition like that. 

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

I almost regretted that my theory about the well's trouble wascorrect, because I had another one that had a showy point or twoabout it for a miracle. I remembered that in America, manycenturies later, when an oil well ceased to flow, they used toblast it out with a dynamite torpedo. If I should find this welldry and no explanation of it, I could astonish these people mostnobly by having a person of no especial value drop a dynamitebomb into it. It was my idea to appoint Merlin. However, it wasplain that there was no occasion for the bomb. One cannot haveeverything the way he would like it. A man has no business tobe depressed by a disappointment, anyway; he ought to make up hismind to get even. That is what I did. I said to myself, I am in nohurry, 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 downa fish-line; the well was a hundred and fifty feet deep, and therewas 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 witnessto it, and better witness than a monk; only about twenty or thirtyfeet of the chain showed wear and use, the rest of it was unwornand rusty. What had happened when the well gave out that othertime? Without doubt some practical person had come along andmended the leak, and then had come up and told the abbot he haddiscovered by divination that if the sinful bath were destroyedthe well would flow again. The leak had befallen again now, andthese children would have prayed, and processioned, and tolledtheir bells for heavenly succor till they all dried up and blewaway, and no innocent of them all would ever have thought to dropa fish-line into the well or go down in it and find out what wasreally the matter. Old habit of mind is one of the toughest thingsto get away from in the world. It transmits itself like physicalform and feature; and for a man, in those days, to have had an ideathat his ancestors hadn't had, would have brought him under suspicionof being illegitimate. I said to the monk:

"It is a difficult miracle to restore water in a dry well, but wewill try, if my brother Merlin fails. Brother Merlin is a verypassable artist, but only in the parlor-magic line, and he maynot succeed; in fact, is not likely to succeed. But that shouldbe nothing to his discredit; the man that can do _this_ kind ofmiracle 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 thismiracle can keep hostel. I can do this miracle; I shall do thismiracle; yet I do not try to conceal from you that it is a miracleto tax the occult powers to the last strain. "

"None knoweth that truth better than the brotherhood, indeed; forit is of record that aforetime it was parlous difficult and tooka year. Natheless, God send you good success, and to that endwill we pray. "

As a matter of business it was a good idea to get the notion aroundthat the thing was difficult. Many a small thing has been madelarge by the right kind of advertising. That monk was filled upwith 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 thehermits. I said:

"I would like to do that myself. This is Wednesday. Is therea 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 seemto understand the simplest thing. "

"I would I might please thee, sir, and it is to me dole and sorrowthat I fail, albeit sith I am but a simple damsel and taught ofnone, being from the cradle unbaptized in those deep waters oflearning that do anoint with a sovereignty him that partaketh ofthat most noble sacrament, investing him with reverend state tothe mental eye of the humble mortal who, by bar and lack of thatgreat consecration seeth in his own unlearned estate but a symbolof that other sort of lack and loss which men do publish to thepitying eye with sackcloth trappings whereon the ashes of griefdo lie bepowdered and bestrewn, and so, when such shall in thedarkness of his mind encounter these golden phrases of high mystery, these shut-up-shops, and draw-the-game, and bank-the-fires, it isbut by the grace of God that he burst not for envy of the mind thatcan beget, and tongue that can deliver so great and mellow-soundingmiracles of speech, and if there do ensue confusion in that humblermind, and failure to divine the meanings of these wonders, thenif so be this miscomprehension is not vain but sooth and true, wit ye well it is the very substance of worshipful dear homage andmay not lightly be misprized, nor had been, an ye had noted thiscomplexion of mood and mind and understood that that I wouldI 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 advantageturned 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, goodmy master and most dear lord. "

I couldn't make it all out--that is, the details--but I got thegeneral idea; and enough of it, too, to be ashamed. It was notfair to spring those nineteenth century technicalities upon theuntutored infant of the sixth and then rail at her because shecouldn't get their drift; and when she was making the honest bestdrive at it she could, too, and no fault of hers that she couldn'tfetch the home plate; and so I apologized. Then we meanderedpleasantly away toward the hermit holes in sociable conversetogether, and better friends than ever. 

I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverencefor this girl; nowadays whenever she pulled out from the stationand got her train fairly started on one of those horizonlesstranscontinental sentences of hers, it was borne in upon me thatI was standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the GermanLanguage. I was so impressed with this, that sometimes when shebegan to empty one of these sentences on me I unconsciously tookthe very attitude of reverence, and stood uncovered; and if wordshad been water, I had been drowned, sure. She had exactly theGerman way; whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether amere 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 literaryGerman dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to seeof him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with hisverb in his mouth. 

We drifted from hermit to hermit all the afternoon. It was a moststrange menagerie. The chief emulation among them seemed to be, to see which could manage to be the uncleanest and most prosperouswith vermin. Their manner and attitudes were the last expressionof complacent self-righteousness. It was one anchorite's prideto lie naked in the mud and let the insects bite him and blisterhim unmolested; it was another's to lean against a rock, all daylong, conspicuous to the admiration of the throng of pilgrimsand 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 whenhe slept, but to stand among the thorn-bushes and snore when therewere pilgrims around to look; a woman, who had the white hair ofage, and no other apparel, was black from crown to heel withforty-seven years of holy abstinence from water. Groups of gazingpilgrims stood around all and every of these strange objects, lostin reverent wonder, and envious of the fleckless sanctity whichthese pious austerities had won for them from an exacting heaven. 

By and by we went to see one of the supremely great ones. He wasa mighty celebrity; his fame had penetrated all Christendom; thenoble and the renowned journeyed from the remotest lands on the globeto pay him reverence. His stand was in the center of the widest partof the valley; and it took all that space to hold his crowds. 

His stand was a pillar sixty feet high, with a broad platform onthe top of it. He was now doing what he had been doing every dayfor twenty years up there--bowing his body ceaselessly and rapidlyalmost to his feet. It was his way of praying. I timed him with astop watch, and he made 1, 244 revolutions in 24 minutes and46 seconds. It seemed a pity to have all this power going to waste. It was one of the most useful motions in mechanics, the pedalmovement; so I made a note in my memorandum book, purposing someday to apply a system of elastic cords to him and run a sewingmachine with it. I afterward carried out that scheme, and gotfive years' good service out of him; in which time he turned outupward of eighteen thousand first-rate tow-linen shirts, whichwas 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 thematerials--I furnished those myself, it would not have been rightto make him do that--and they sold like smoke to pilgrims at adollar and a half apiece, which was the price of fifty cows ora blooded race horse in Arthurdom. They were regarded as a perfectprotection against sin, and advertised as such by my knightseverywhere, with the paint-pot and stencil-plate; insomuch thatthere was not a cliff or a bowlder or a dead wall in England butyou 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 downthe forehatch and the running-gear clewed up with a featherstitchto leeward and then hauled aft with a back-stay and triced up witha 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 tostanding on one leg, and I found that there was something the matterwith the other one; so I stocked the business and unloaded, takingSir Bors de Ganis into camp financially along with certain of hisfriends; for the works stopped within a year, and the good saintgot 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 conditionwill not quite bear description here. You can read it in theLives of the Saints. *

[*All the details concerning the hermits, in this chapter, are fromLecky--but greatly modified. This book not being a history butonly a tale, the majority of the historian's frank details were toostrong for reproduction in it. --_Editor_]