Jaxi-ary 1, 18S7.] 



♦ KNOW^LEDGE ♦ 



fly 



"Said I. -Will T which?' 



" ■ Will voii jdiist ( Will you break a lance for land or 

 lady r 



" Said J. ' What aie _von giving m;'? Vou go along back 

 to 3-oiu- cii'Liis. or I'll roporf yon.' 



" Now what does this fallow do bnt fall back a conple of 

 hundred yards, and then come tilting at me as hard as he 

 could drive, his cheese-box down close and his long sjiear 

 pointed straight at me. I saw he meant business, so I was 

 up the tree when he arrived. Well, he allowed I was his 

 property ; the captive of his spear. There was argument 

 on his side and the bulk of the advantage, so I judged it 

 best to humour him, and we fixed up .an agreement. I was 

 to go along with him, and he wasn't to hurt me. So I 

 came down, and we started away, I walking by the side of 

 his horse ; and we marched comfortably along through the 

 glades and over brooks that I could not remember to have 

 seen before. It puzzled me ever so much, and yet we 

 didn't come to any circus, or any sign of a circus, so I gave 

 up the idea of a circus, and concluded he was from an 

 asylum. But we never came to any asylum, so I was up a 

 stump, as you may say." 



And so the two wander on together, and amid scenes of 

 human life that aflbrd the author luany op[)ortunities for 

 quxint philosophic contrasts and dry humour, until they 

 came to C'amtdot, to the Court of King Arthur. Fanciful 

 and curious are the reflections of the transposed Yankee 

 about that place — which he at first thinks must be the 

 asylum — in its country of soft, reposeful summer landscape, 

 as lovely as a dream and lonesome as Sunday, where the air 

 was fill of the smell of flowers and the buzzing of insects 

 and the twittering of birds, and there were no people, or 

 waggons, or life, or anything going on. 



A'ery vividly he portrays the scene at C'amelot, where 

 King Arthur, with his knights, sits at a round tab'e as big 

 as a circus ring, and three hundred dogs fia;ht for bones 

 around them ; while the musicians are in one gallery high 

 aloft, .and the ladies in another. But before he gets in there 

 he seeks information from a plain-looking man in the outer 

 court, saj'ing to him : " ' Now, my friend, do nie a kindness. 

 Tell me, do you belong to the asylum, or are you just here 

 on a visit, or something like that '] ' And he looked me 



over stupidly, and said : ' Marry ! Fair sir ' ' Oh ! ' 



I said, ' that will do. I guess you are a patient.' To 

 another he said : ' Now, my friend, if I could see the head- 

 keeper just a minute — only just a minute.' He said : 

 'Prithee do not let me.' 'Let you what?' 'Do not 

 hinder me, if the word please thee better.' And he was an 

 under-cook, and had no time to talk, though he would like 

 to another t me, for it would just comfort his very liver to 

 know where I got my clothes.' 



Then another — a lad — aime to him, saying that he was a 

 page. " ' Oh ! go along,' 1 said ; ' 3-ou ain't more than a 

 paragraph.' " The page happened to mention that he was 

 born in the beginning of the year 513. 



" It made the cold chills creep over me. I stopped and 

 said, a little faintly, 'Now, may he I didn't hear you just 

 right. Would you say that ngain, and say it slow ? What 

 year did you say it was ] ' — ' The year 513.' 



" ' And, according to your notions — according to your 

 lights and super.stitions — what year is it now 1 ' — ' Why,' he 

 said, 'the year 528, the 19th of June.' Well, I felt a 

 mournful sinking of the heart, and muttered, ' I shall never 

 see my friends again — never see ray friends any more ; they 

 ■won't be born for as much as a thousand years.' " 



The speaker had often been interrupted by laughter, but 

 fit the originality and fun of that conceit his auditors 

 laughed until they cried, and kept on laughing with renewed 

 outbursts over and over again. How the 'cute Yankee 



determined to get at the bottom facts about the year by 

 watching for a total eclipse of the sun, that ho remembered 

 the almanack of 1884 had spoken of as having occurred 

 in 528, will have to be learned from the book when it 

 ap|)pars. 



" I made up ni}' mind to two things. If it was still tho 

 nineteenth century, and I was amongst lunatics and couldn't 

 get away, I would boss that asj'lum or know the reason why, 

 and if, on the other hand, it was really the sixth century, all 

 right. I didn't want any better thing; I'd boss the whole 

 country inside of three months, for I judged I'd have the 

 start on the best educated mau in the kiagdom by 1,300 



years But I'm not a man to waste time, so I said to 



the boy : ' Clarence, if your name should happen to be 

 Clarence, what's the name of that duck, that giiioot, who 

 brought mo here 1 ' " 



The galoot turned out to be Sir Kay, the seneschal. In 

 the natural course of the story came tlie charming desciip- 

 tion of the interior of King Arthur's castle, leading up 

 to a royally funny account of the competitive lying of 

 the gallant knights about their feats at arms. The trans- 

 posed Smith looked upon the knights as a sort of " white 

 Indians," admired their bigness and their simplicity, and 

 eventually concluded : 



•' There didn't seem to be brains enough in the entire 

 nursery to bait a fishhook, but you didn't min<l that after a 

 little while, for you saw that brains were not needed in a 

 society like that, and would have marred its symmetry and 

 spoiled it." 



Everybody goes to sleep when Merlin reels off" that same 

 old story about Excalibur. (Juinevere makes eyes at Laun- 

 celot in a way that would have got him shot in Arkansas. 

 King Arthur orders the Yankee to go to some unknown 

 place not down in any map, capture a castle, kill the colossal, 

 saucer-eyed ogre who owned it, and release sixty royal prin- 

 cesses. Of course he went, but he reflected. 



" Well, of all the d d contract.s, this is boss ! I 



oflered to sublet it to Sir Launcelot, to let him have it ninety 

 (lavs, with no margin ; but ' No,' he had got a better thing. 

 He was going for a menagerie of one-eyed giants and a college 

 of princesses." 



It occurs to him finally, after wondering if a compromise 

 with the ogre wouldn't work, simply to go back and tell the 

 king with artistic circumstantiality of detail, that he was 

 killed by the ogre. He does so, and, of coui-se, the king and 

 his knights, who are used to swallowing each other's huge 

 lies, readily take in hi.s, and a brilliant career opens before 

 him as the boss liar of the court. 



He took ,a contract iVom King Arthur to kill ofl' at one 

 of the great tournaments fifteen kings and many acres of 

 hostile armoured knights. When, lance in rest, they charged 

 by squadrons upon him, he, behind the protection of a 

 barbed wire fence charged with electricity, mowed them 

 down with Catling guns that he had made for the occasion. 

 He found that the "education of the nineteenth century is 

 plenty good enough capital to go into business in the sixth 

 century with," and the next j'ear he was running the 

 kingdom all by himself on a moderate roj^alty of 40 per 

 cent. 



He spoiled the ogre business ; cleared out the fuss and 

 flummery of romance, and put King Arthur's kingdom on a 

 strictly business basis. Inside of three and a half years the 

 improvement was complete. Cast-iron clothes had gone out 

 of fashion. Sir Launcelot was running a kind of Louisiana 

 lottery. The search for the holy grail had been given up 

 in favour of a hunt for the north-west passage. King 

 Arthur's 140 illustiious knights had turned themselves into 

 a stock-board, antl a seat at the round table was worth 

 30,000 dols. 



