The Complete Twain Postings

Hey Folks,

Here it is! The whole ball of wax, the whole can of worms, the “compleat” Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court, expurgated – by the Uke Man - for rapid assimilation.

The story starts out at Warick Castle in England, where the author Mark Twain, a participant/character in the story, is "touring." In the process he meets an odd stranger, a talkative man well-informed about both ancient armor and the ancient individuals who wore it.

When the tour guide points out a strange, unaccountable hole in one specimen of armor we hear:

“Ancient hauberk, date of the sixth century, time of King Arthur and the Round Table; said to have belonged to the knight Sir Sagramour le Desirous; observe the round hole through the chain mail in the left breast; can’t be accounted for; supposed to have been done with a bullet since invention of firearms – perhaps maliciously by Cromwell’s soldiers.”

My acquaintance smiled – not a modern smile, but one that must have gone out of general use many, many centuries ago – and muttered, apparently to himself:

“Wit ye well, I saw it done.” Then, after a pause, added: “ I did it myself.”

The “Stranger,” it turns out, is in possession of a manuscript recounting his memoirs, and he leaves it with Twain to read. The story, for the most part, is made up of this memoir.

The “conceit” or assumption that makes this all work is that, somehow, a person can be “transpositioned” through epochs. People in Twain’s time (and now?) believe in the “transmigration of souls”; so, it wasn’t much of a stretch to suspend disbelief over someone being knocked out in the 19th century and waking up in the 6th century.

Well, the “Stranger,” Hank Morgan, the Yankee, the superintendent of “the great Colt arms-factory,” overseeing “a couple thousand men,” gets in a fight at the factory, ending with a crushing blow from a crowbar “along side the head,” and wakes up in 6th century England, not far from Camelot.

It takes some time for him to take it all in – all the new and archaic conditions. He finds the date and the people difficult to reconcile with his experience. Early-on, along the way, he meets a page, Clarence, who will be his friend and aide throughout the story.

In his 19th century dress and his cultural ignorance, he is taken prisoner, taken to Arthur’s court, and sentenced to be burned at the stake. He is thrown into the dungeon to await his execution.

With the help of Clarence, he subsequently communicates to the court his intent to blot out the sun and destroy the earth if the sentence is pursued - knowing, from his knowledge of history, that a total eclipse of the sun was to occur on the appointed day.

At Merlin’s insistence, however, the planned execution is moved forward, but since Clarence had been confused about the actual date, it all works out. At the appointed time the eclipse begins, the Yankee is saved, and his status as highest in the land – second only to King Arthur – is established.

From this point on, for most of the story, the Yankee is in position to shed light on the human condition – not only as it was in the 6th century but accurately for the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries as well.

Chapter 8 – the Yankee reflects on the self-destructive gullibility of the populace:

Well, it was a curious country, and full of interest. And the people! They were the quaintest and simplest and trustingest race; why they were nothing but rabbits. It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Church and nobility: as if they had any more occasion to love and honor king and Church and noble than a slave has to love and honor the lash, or a dog has to love and honor the stranger that kicks him! Why, dear me, ANY kind of royalty, howsoever modified, ANY kind of aristocracy, however pruned, is rightly an insult; but if you are born and brought up under that sort of arrangement you probably never find it out for yourself, and don’t believe it when somebody else tells you.

Chapter 8 – the Yankee describes the Arthurian proletariat:

The most of King Arthur’s British nation were slaves . . . and the rest were slaves in fact, but without the name; they imagined themselves men and freemen, and called themselves so. The truth was, the nation as a body was in the world for one object, and one only: to grovel before king and Church and noble; to slave for them, sweat blood for them, starve that they might be fed, work that they might play, drink misery to the dregs that they might be happy, go naked that they might wear silks and jewels, pay taxes that they might be spared from paying them, be familiar all their lives with the degrading language and postures of adulation that they might walk in pride and think themselves the gods of this world.

Chapter 8 – the Yankee recognizes a sad verity:

Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and examine. I had mine, the king and his people had theirs. In both cases they flowed in ruts worn deep by time and habit, and the man who should have proposed to divert them by reason and argument would have had a long contract on his hands.

Chapter 13 – The Yankee’s take on the French Revolution:

Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever-memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood – one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery, the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it: the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with life-long death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning, compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror – that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

Chapter 17 – The Yankee observes religion among the nobility.

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

Chapter 18 – the one microscopic atom in each of us that is truly us.

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


Chapter 20 – The Yankee observes the oppressed and comments (following the release - by the Yankee's orders - of prisoners wrongly imprisoned for most of their lives).

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

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


Chapter 21 - The Yankee learns the history of the desolate Valley of Holiness and of the “loving labors” (think about it) of the monks and nuns.

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

“Then I take it nobody has washed since.”

“He that would essay it could have his halter free; yea, and swiftly would he need it, too.”

“The community has prospered since?”

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


Chapter 22 - The Yankee comments on human nature at the occasion of the miraculous fountain’s ceasing to flow.

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


Chapter 25 – The Yankee explains the King’s justice (sounds familiar).

And although this expedition was strictly a holiday excursion for the king, he kept some of his business functions going, just the same. He touched for the evil as usual; he held court in the gate at sunrise and tried causes, for he was himself Chief Justice of the King’s Bench.

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


Chapter 26 – Long ago the Kings “touched” the sick to heal them (as TV evangelists do today). Part of the operation involved giving each afflicted soul a small coin. The Yankee replaces the worn and irregularly shaped gold bit currently the practice with a less-valuable nickel he had minted especially for this purpose.

I judged that a sharp, bright new nickel, with a first-rate likeness of the king on one side of it and Guenever on the other, and a blooming pious motto, would take the tuck out of scrofula [the predominant malady – Uke Man] as handy as a nobler coin and please the scrofulous fancy more; and I was right. This batch was the first it was tried on, and it worked to a charm. The saving in expense was a notable economy.

. . . In making this substitution I had drawn upon the wisdom of a very remote source - the wisdom of my boyhood . . . in my boyhood I had always saved my pennies, and contributed buttons to the foreign missionary cause. The buttons would answer the ignorant savage as well as the coin, the coin would answer me better than the buttons; all hands were happy, and nobody hurt.


Chapter 28 – The Yankee discusses the nature of work

There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and complacently about “the working classes,” and satisfy themselves that a day’s hard intellectual work is very much harder than a day’s manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much bigger pay. Why, they really think that, you know, because they know all about the one, but haven’t tried the other. But I know all about both; and as far as I am concerned, there isn’t money enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pickaxe thirty days, but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as near nothing as you can cipher it down – and I will be satisfied, too. Intellectual “work” is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer, is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the magician with the fiddle-bow in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him – why certainly, he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it’s a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair – but there it is, and nothing can change it; the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, also. And it’s also the very law of those transparent swindles, transmissible nobility and kingship [and the aristocracy of inherited wealth – Uke Man].


Chapter 30 – The Yankee and the King come upon a burning Manor house and a mob of peasants busy chasing down and hanging other peasants suspected of having killed the oppressive lord and burning his manor.

The painful thing observable about all this business was the alacrity with which this oppressed community had turned their cruel hands against their own class in the interest of the common oppressor. This man and woman seemed to feel that in a quarrel between a person of their own class and his lord, it was the natural and proper and rightful thing for that poor devil’s whole caste to side with the master and fight his battle for him, without ever stopping to inquire into the rights or wrongs of the matter. This man had been out helping to hang his neighbors, and had done his work with zeal, and yet was aware that there was nothing against them but a mere suspicion, with nothing back of it describable as evidence; still neither he nor his wife seemed to see anything horrible about it.

This was depressing – to a man with the dream of a republic in his head. It reminded me of a time thirteen centuries away, when the “poor whites” of our South who were always despised, and frequently insulted, by the slave lords around them, and who owed their base condition simply to the presence of slavery in their midst, were yet pusillanimously ready to side with the slave lords in all political moves for the upholding and perpetuating of slavery, and did also finally shoulder their muskets and pour out their lives in an effort to prevent the destruction of that very institution which degraded them.


Chapter 32 – The Yankee, still in disguise, "sets up" the blacksmith, a “self-made man” who is quite full of himself to blather on about his own "importance."

Dowley was in fine feather, and I early got him started, and then adroitly worked him around onto his own history for a text and himself for a hero, and then it was good to sit there and hear him hum. Self-made man, you know. They know how to talk. They do deserve more credit than any other breed of man, yes, that’s true; and they are among the very first to find it out, too. He told how he had begun life an orphan lad without money and without friends able to help him [etc., etc. – until he achieved his present "high" station in life – at least compared to the other artisans in the village – that is, as he says] “Two times in every month there is fresh meat upon my table . . .and eight times, salt meat . . . [and] on my table appeareth white bread every Sunday in the year.”


Chapter 33 – The Yankee discusses wages and their future with Dowley, the blacksmith.

“Brother Dowley, who is it that determines, every spring, what the particular wage of each kind of mechanic, laborer, and servant shall be for that year?”

“Sometimes the courts, sometimes the town council, but most of all, the magistrate, Ye may say, in general terms, it is the magistrate that fixes wages.”

“Doesn’t ask any of those poor devils to HELP him fix their wages for them, does he?”

“Hm! That WERE an idea! The master that’s to pay him the money is the one that’s rightly concerned in that matter, ye will notice.”

“Yes – but I thought the other man might have some little trifle at stake in it too; and even his wife and children, poor creatures. The masters are these: nobles, rich men, the prosperous generally. These few, who do no work, determine what pay the vast hive shall have, who DO work. You see? They’re a ‘combine’ – a trade union, to coin a new phrase – who band together to force their lowly brother to take what they choose to give. Thirteen hundred years hence – so says the unwritten law – the ‘combine’ will be the other way, and then how these fine people’s posterity will fume and fret and grit their teeth over the insolent tyranny of trade unions! Yes, indeed! The magistrate will tranquilly arrange the wages from now clear way down into the nineteenth century; and then all of a sudden the wage-earner will consider that a couple of thousand years or so is enough of this one-sided sort of thing, and he will rise up and take a hand in fixing his wages himself. Ah. He will have a long and bitter account of wrong and humiliation to settle.”

Chapter 34 – The King (the font and creator of the country’s laws) and the Yankee (both still disguised as peasants) are sold into slavery.

A dozen of the rascal’s servants sprang forward, and in a moment we were helpless, with our hands bound behind us. We so loudly and so earnestly proclaimed ourselves freemen, that we got the interested attention of that liberty-mouthing orator and his patriotic crowd, and they gathered about us and assumed a very determined attitude. The orator said:

“If indeed ye are freemen, ye have naught to fear – the God-given liberties of Britain are about ye for your shield and shelter! [Applause.] Ye shall soon see. Bring forth your proofs.”

“What proofs?”

“Proofs that ye are freemen.”

Ah – I remembered! I came to myself: I said nothing. But the king stormed out:

“Thou’rt insane, man. It were better, and more in reason, that this thief and scoundrel here prove that we are NOT freemen.”

You see. He knew his own laws just as other people so often know the laws: by words, not by effects. They take a MEANING, and get very vivid, when you come to apply them to yourself.


Chapter 34 - It’s all in the perspective: Einsteinian/ Hans Chritian Andersenian relativity.

The slave dealer bought us both, and hitched us onto that long chain of his, and we constituted the rear of his procession. We took up our line of march and passed out of Cambenet at noon; and it seemed to me unaccountably strange and odd, that the king of England and his chief minister, marching manacled and fettered and yoked, in a slave convoy, could move by all manner of idle men and women, and under windows, where sat the sweet and the lovely, and yet never attract a curious eye, never provoke a single remark. Dear, dear, it only shows that there is nothing diviner about a king than there is about a tramp, after all. He is just a cheap and hollow artificiality when you don’t know he is a king. But reveal his quality, and dear me, it takes your very breath away to look at him. I reckon we are all fools. Born so, no doubt.


Chapter 39 – The Yankee is forced to joust with Sir Sagramour Le Deserious who has been festering for years over an imagined insult. The newspaper (another of the Yankee’s innovations) covered the story. In promoting the event it offers commentary upon the nature of “charities” (and also expresses why the Uke Man thinks society as a whole – not charities – should address society’s ills).


The box office will be open at noon of the 13th; admission 3 cents, reserved seats 5; proceeds go to the hospital fund. The royal pair and all the Court will be present. With these exceptions, and the press and the clergy, the free list is strictly suspended. Parties are hereby warned against buying tickets of speculators;they will not be good at the door. Everybody knows and likes The Boss, everybody knows and likes Sir Sag; come, let us give the lads a good send-off. Remember, the proceeds go to a great and free charity, and one whose broad benevolence stretches out its helping hand, warm with the blood of a loving heart, to all that suffer, regardless of race, creed, condition or color – the only charity yet established in the earth which has no politico-religious stop-cock on its compassion, but says Here flows the stream, let ALL come and drink!


Chapter 39 – The trouble begins. This novel has been called “the longest sustained invective in the English language.” To this point Twain has been savagely critical of innumerable human traits, most often as demonstrated by those benighted folks around the Yankee, but also as demonstrated now and then by the Yankee himself.

If you’ve been reading along with this continuing saga of excerpts, you may remember from an earlier posting:

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

The Yankee wanted a bloodless revolution. Throughout the story he had taken steps to bring down the nobility and knight-errantry via subtle ridicule and debasement – having some wear sandwich boards advertising mundane things like tooth brushes, having others riding about selling stove polish (before stoves even existed), selling soap, and having others sell top-hats – which they wore instead of helmets. The idea was to gradually work them away from all the class, superstitious, and prejudicial aspects that oppressed the vast mass of people which actually WAS the nation.

In the Yankee’s confrontation with Sir Sagramour Le Deserious, the Yankee’s intentions are made perfectly clear and the stakes are raised as well:

“Up to the day set, there was no talk in all Britain of anything but this combat. All other topics sank into insignificance and passed out of men’s thoughts and interest. . . there was abundant reason for the extraordinary interest which this coming fight was creating. It was born of the fact that all the nation knew that this was not to be a duel between mere men, so to speak, but a duel between two mighty magicians; a duel not of muscle but of mind, not of human skill but of super human art and craft; a final struggle for supremacy between the two master enchanters of the age. . . Yes, all the world knew it was going to be in reality a duel between Merlin and me, a measuring of his magic powers against mine. . . Merlin had been busy whole days and nights together, imbuing Sir Sagramour’s arms and armor with supernatural powers of offence and defense. . .

So the world thought there was a vast matter at stake here, and the world was right; but it was not the one they had in their minds. No, a far vaster one was upon the cast of the die: THE LIFE OF KNIGHT-ERRANTRY. I was a champion, it was true, but not the champion of the frivolous black arts, I was champion of hard, unsentimental, common-sense and reason. I was entering the lists to either destroy knight-errantry or be its victim.”


Chapter 39 - The plot thickens. The Yankee had intended to defeat Sir Sagramour and the other knights who would inevitably enter the lists against him, one after the other, by the harmless use of a lasso. And so he does until Lancelot, the greatest of them all, and the last remaining challenger, takes the field and begins his charge.

“In that moment, down came the Invincible, with the rush of a whirlwind – the courtly world rose to its feet and bent forward – the fateful coils went circling through the air, and before you could wink I was towing Sir Launcelot across the field on his back, and kissing my hand to the storm of waving handkerchiefs and the thunder-crash of applause that greeted me!

Said I to myself, as I coiled my lariat and hung it on my saddle-horn, and sat there drunk with glory, ‘The victory is perfect – no other will venture against me – knight-errantry is dead.” Now imagine my astonishment – and everybody else’s, too – to hear the peculiar bugle call which announces that another competitor is about to enter the lists!”




Chapter 39 – The Yankee’s plan for a bloodless victory over knight-errantry had gone well, defeating all with just the use of a lariat. But then another challenger is announced. It is Sir Sagramour with blood in his eyes and determined to have another go at it, but this time with his broadsword rather than a lance. In the meantime, “Next, I noticed Merlin gliding away from me; and then I noticed that my lasso was gone! That old sleight-of-hand expert had stolen it, sure, and slipped it under his robe.”

Although Lancelot objects and the king is concerned, the arguments of Sagramour and Merlin, in the end, force the Yankee to face the angry night without apparent defense.



“The bugle made proclamation, and we turned apart and rode to our stations. There we stood, a hundred yards apart, facing each other, rigid and motionless, like horsed statues. And so we remained, in a soundless hush, as much as a full minute, everybody gazing, nobody stirring. It seemed as if the king could not take heart to give the signal. But at last he lifted his hand, the clear note of the bugle followed, Sir Sagramour’s long blade described a flashing curve in the air, and it was superb to see him come. I sat still. On he came. I did not move. People got so excited that they shouted to me.

‘Fly, fly! Save thyself! This is murther !’

I never budged so much as an inch, till that thundering apparition had got within fifteen paces of me; then I snatched a dragoon revolver out of my holster, there was a flash and a roar, and the revolver was back in the holster before anybody could tell what had happened.

Here was a riderless horse plunging by, and yonder lay Sir Sagramour, stone dead”



The blood had started to flow.


Chapter 39 – After shooting Sir Sagramour out of his saddle, the Yankee was not satisfied to end the day as he could have easily done with all of knighthood cowed by the event, but instead challenges them and then goads them into accepting it!

Then I said:
“If there are any who doubt that this field is well and fairly won, I do not wait for them to challenge me, I challenge them.”

“It is a gallant offer,” said the king, “and well beseems you. Whom will you name first?”

“I name none, I challenge all! Here I stand, and dare the chivalry of England to come against me – not by individuals, but in mass!”

“What!” shouted a score of knights.

“You have heard the challenge. Take it, or I proclaim you recreant knights and vanquished, every one!”

It was a “bluff,” you know. At such a time it is sound judgment to put on a bold face and play your hand for a hundred times what it is worth; forty-nine times out of fifty nobody dares to “call,” and you rake in the chips. But just this once – well, things looked squally! In just no time, five hundred knights were scrambling into their saddles, and before you could wink a widely scattering drove were under way and clattering down upon me. I snatched both revolvers from the holsters and began to measure distances and calculate chances.

Bang! One saddle empty. Bang! Another one. Bang-bang! And I bagged two. Well, it was nip and tuck with us, and I knew it. If I spent the eleventh shot without convincing these people, the twelfth man would kill me, sure.

And so I never did feel so happy as I did when my ninth downed its man and I detected the wavering in the crowd which is premonitory of panic. An instant lost, now, could knock out my last chance. But I didn’t lose it. I raised both revolvers and pointed them – the halted host stood their ground just about one good square moment, then broke and fled.

The day was mine. Knight-errantry was a doomed institution. The march of civilization was begun. How did I feel? Ah, you never could imagine it.

And Brer Merlin? His stock was flat again. Somehow, every time the magic of fol-de-rol tried conclusions with the magic of science, the magic of fol-de rol got left.



(note to the reader: That day in the story the Yankee killed his first ten men, and the experience leaves him with what I find to be strange feelings. Also, the last sentence holds significance in regard to both the story and our own situation today. – Uke Man )


Chapter 40 - “Three Years Later” - Having vanquished night-errantry, the Yankee steps out of hiding.

“I no longer felt obliged to work in secret. So, the very next day I exposed my hidden schools, my mines, and my vast system of clandestine factories and work-shops to an astonished world.”

He knew the knights would realize he’d been bluffing in the lists; so he repeated the challenge:

“I said, name the day, and I would take fifty assistants and stand up against the massed chivalry of the whole earth and destroy it.

I was not bluffing, this time. I meant what I said; I could do what I promised. . . this was a plain case of ‘put up or shut up.’ They were wise, and did the latter. In all the next three years they gave me no trouble worth mentioning.”


Chapter 40 - “Three Years Later” – In the three years following the massacre in the lists, the 19th century “improvements” blossomed: schools, colleges, newspapers, railroads, telephones, phonographs, typewriters, sewing machines, electricity, etc. Slavery was outlawed; knights were employed as salesmen and railroad conductors. Modernity was rampant. Things were moving in the Yankee’s desired direction.

“ I was very happy. Things were working steadily toward a secretly longed-for point. You see, I had two schemes in my head, which were the vastest of all my projects. The one was, to overthrow the Catholic Church and set up the Protestant faith on its ruins – not as an Established Church, but a go-as-you-please one; and the other project was, to get a decree issued by and by, commanding that upon Arthur’s death unlimited suffrage should be introduced, and given to men and women alike – at any rate to all men, wise or unwise, and to all mothers who, at middle age, should be found to know nearly as much as their sons at twenty-one. Arthur was good for thirty years yet, he being about my own age – that is to say, forty – and I believed that in that time I could easily have the active part of the population of that day ready and eager for an event which should be the first of its kind in the history of the world – a rounded and complete governmental revolution without bloodshed, The result to be a Republic. Well, I may as well confess, though I do feel ashamed when I think of it: I was beginning to have a base hankering to be its first President myself. Yes, there was more or less human nature in me; I found that out.



Chapter 40-41 - “Three Years Later” continued – In this time the Yankee has married Sandy – the damsel of his earlier adventure, and they have a child, “Hello Central.” The knights are kept busy as stock brokers, and in their spare time they’ve started up baseball teams, consisting of kings and emperors from around the known world.

At one point the Yankee and Sandy are advised to take their sick child to a warmer climate in France. While there, oblivious of everything except nursing their child, things changed. The ship they’d sent for supplies and news never returned, and all the evidence of sea commerce that had been so evident during their arrival had evaporated. The Yankee leaves Sandy and the baby and sails home.

“ I approached England the next morning, with the wide highway of salt water all to myself. There were ships in the harbor, at Dover, but they were naked, as to sails, and there was no sign of life about them. It was Sunday, yet at Canterbury the streets were empty; strangest of all there was not even a priest in sight, and no stroke of a bell fell upon my ear. The mournfulness of death was everywhere. I couldn’t understand it. At last, in the further edge of that town I saw a small funeral procession – just a family and a few friends following a coffin – no priest; a funeral without bell, book or candle; there was a church there, close at hand, but they passed it by, weeping, and did not enter it; I glanced up at the belfry, and there hung the bell, shrouded in black, and its tongue tied back. Now I knew! Now I understood the stupendous calamity that had overtaken England. Invasion? Invasion is a triviality to it. It was the INTERDICT!

. . . The Church had struck; the thing for me to do was to get into a disguise; and go warily . . . A miserable journey. A desolate silence everywhere. Even in London itself. Traffic had ceased; men did not talk or laugh, or go in groups, or even in couples; they moved aimlessly about, each man by himself, with his head down, and woe and terror in his heart . . . it made me feel as if maybe it was symbolical – a sort of sign that the Church was going to KEEP the upper hand, now, snuff out all my beautiful civilization just like that.”


Chapter 42 – “War!” - In the Yankee’s absence war broke out, THE war of the Arthurian legend – the trouble over Guinevere, Lancelot, and Arthur; and the darkness of Mordred. When the Yankee returns, the knights have been decimated and the round Table is no more, Mordred and Arthur are dead, Guinevere is in a convent, and the Church is in charge.

The Yankee, who is being briefed on all of this by his loyal cohort Clarence, says:

“What changes! And in such a short while. It is inconceivable. What next, I wonder?”

“I can tell you what next.”

“Well?”

“Stake our lives and stand by them!”

“What do you mean by that?”

“The Church is master, now. The Interdict included you with Mordred; it is not to be removed while you remain alive. The clans are gathering. The Church has gathered all the knights that are left alive, and as soon as you are discovered, we shall have business on our hands.”

“Stuff! With our deadly scientific war-material – with our hosts of trained – “

“Save your breath – we haven’t sixty faithful left!”

“What are you saying? Our schools, our colleges, our vast workshops, our – “

“When those knights come, those establishments will empty themselves and go over to the enemy. Did you think you had educated the superstition out of these people!”

“I certainly did think it.”

“Well, then, you may unthink it. They stood every strain easily – until the Interdict. Since then, they merely put on a bold outside – at heart they are quaking. Make up your mind to it – when the armies come, the mask will fall.”




Chapter 42 - The Yankee and all his plans are in jeopardy, and all but sixty of his faithful followers have succumbed to superstitious fear. His assistant
Clarence explains that the Church, through its servants the doctors, had sent him out of the country for their own purposes; whereupon the reactionary
forces immediately began to dismantle every one of the Yankee’s 19th century “improvements.”


“Our navy had suddenly and mysteriously disappeared!
Also as suddenly and as mysteriously, the railway and
telegraph and telephone service ceased, the men all
deserted, poles were cut down, the Church laid a ban
upon the electric light! I had to be up and doing -
and straight off. Your life was safe - nobody in
these kingdoms but Merlin would venture to touch such
a magician as you, without ten thousand men at his
back - I had nothing to think of but how to put
preparations in the best trim against your coming. I
felt safe myself - nobody would be anxious to touch a
pet of yours. So this is what I did. From our
various works I selected all the men - boys, I mean -
whose faithfulness under whatsoever pressure I could
swear to, and I called them together secretly and gave
them their instructions. There are fifty- two of
them; none younger than fourteen, and none above
seventeen years old.”

“Why did you select boys?”

“Because all the others were born in an atmosphere of
superstition, and reared in it. It is in their blood
and bones. We imagined we had educated it out of
them; they thought so, too; the Interdict woke them up
like a thunderclap! It revealed them to themselves,
and it revealed them to me, too. With boys it was
different. Such as have been under our training from
seven to ten years have had no acquaintance with the
Church’s terrors, and it was among these that I found
my fifty-two.”


Chapter 42 – In the Yankee’s absence, faithful Clarence has been busy preparing a defense for him and his remaining supporters. In a large cave – formerly one of Merlin’s haunts – he’s activated a large generator and built wire fences.

“The wires go out from the cave and fence-in a circle of level ground a hundred yards in diameter; they make twelve independent fences, ten feet apart – that is to say, twelve circles within circles – and the ends come into the cave again.”

The fence is to be electrified as needed. Clarence also has gatling guns at the ready and mines (“glass-cylinder dynamite torpedoes”). The defense is impenetrable. The Yankee speaks to Clarence.

“Yes, everything is ready; everything is ship-shape, no detail is wanting. I know what to do, now.”

“So do I: sit down and wait.”

“No, sir! rise up and strike!”

“Do you mean it?”

“Yes, indeed! The defensive isn’t in my line, and the offensive is. That is, when I hold a fair hand – two-thirds as good a hand as the enemy. Oh, yes, we’ll rise up and strike; that’s our game.”

“A hundred to one, you are right. When does the performance begin?”

“Now! We’ll proclaim the Republic.”

“Well, that will precipitate things, sure enough!”

“It will make them buzz, I tell you! England will be a hornet’s nest before noon to-morrow, if the Church hasn’t lost its cunning – and we know it hasn’t. Now you write and I’ll dictate – thus:

****************** PROCLAMATION

‘BE IT KNOWN UNTO ALL. Whereas, the king having died and left no heir, it becomes my duty to continue the executive authority vested in me, until a government shall have been created and set in motion. The monarchy has lapsed, it no longer exists. By consequence, all political power has reverted to its original source, the people of the nation. With the monarchy, its several adjuncts died also; wherefore there is no longer a nobility, no longer a privileged class, no longer an Established Church: all men are become exactly equal, they are upon one common level, and religion is free. A Republic is hereby proclaimed, as being the natural estate of a nation when other authority has ceased. It is the duty of the British people to meet together immediately, and by their votes elect representatives and deliver into their hands the government.’

I signed it ‘The Boss,’ and dated it from Merlin’s Cave.


Chapter 43 – After posting the Proclamation and making sure defenses were “ship-shape,” as the Yankee put it, they had a week to sit and wait.

“I had spies out, every night, of coursae, to get news. Every report made things look more and more impressive. The hosts were gathering, gathering, down all the roads and paths of England the knights were riding; and priests rode with them, to hearten these original Crusaders, this being the Church’s war. All the nobilities, big and little, were on their way, and all the gentry. This was all as was expected. We should thin out this sort of folk to such a degree that the people would have nothing to do but just step to the front with their Republic and –

Ah, what a donkey I was! Toward the end of the week, I began to get this large and disenchanting fact through my head: that the mass of the nation had swung their caps and shouted for the Republic for about one day, and there an end! The Church, the nobles and the gentry then turned one grand all-disapproving frown upon them and shriveled them to sheep! From that moment the sheep had begun to gather to the fold – that is to say, the camps – and offer their valueless lives and their valuable wool to the “righteous cause.” Why, even the very men who had lately been slaves were in the “righteous cause,” and glorifying it, praying for it, sentimentally slobbering over it, just like all the other commoners. Imagine such human muck as this; conceive of the folly!

Yes, it was now “Death to the Republic!” everywhere – not a dissenting voice. All England was marching against us! Truly this was more than I had bargained for.”


Chapter 43 – With the realization that “All England was marching against” him, the Yankee had to do some quick thinking to avoid losing the fifty-two frightened boys who were still standing by him. He argued that the despised nobility and gentry – rather than the common folks – the boys’ own class – would, as was the custom, lead the attack. That these thirty thousand would be destroyed and “Immediately after, the civilian multitude in the rear will retire, to meet business engagements elsewhere” ; and that will be that. - The boys were satisfied.

“I was ready for the enemy, now. Let the approaching big day come along – it would find us on deck.

The big day arrived, on time. At dawn the sentry on watch in the corral came into the cave and reported a moving black mass under the horizon, and a faint sound which he thought to be military music. Breakfast was just ready; we sat down and ate it.

This over, I made the boys a little speech, and then sent out a detail to man the battery, with Clarence in command of it.

The sun rose presently, and sent its unobstructed splendors over the land, and we saw a prodigious host moving slowly toward us, with the steady drift and aligned front of a wave of the sea. Nearer and nearer it came, and more and more sublimely imposing became its aspect; yes, all England was there, apparently. Soon we could see the innumerable banners fluttering, and then the sun struck the sea of armor and set it all aflash. Yes, it was a fine sight; I hadn’t ever seen anything to beat it.

At last we could make out the details. All the front ranks, no telling how many acres deep, were horsemen – plumed knights in armor. Suddenly we heard the blare of trumpets; the slow walk burst into a gallop, and then – well, it was wonderful to see! Down swept that vast horse-shoe wave – it approached the sand-belt – my breath stood still; nearer, nearer – the strip of green turf beyond the yellow belt grew narrower – narrower, still – became a mere ribbon in front of the horses – then disappeared under their hoofs. Great Scott! Why, the whole front of that host shot into the sky with a thunder-crash, and became a whirling tempest of rags and fragments; and along the ground lay a thick wall of smoke that hid what was left of the multitude from our sight.


Chapter 43 – After the thundering explosion as the charging knights entered the mine-field, heavy smoke obscured the battlefield for half an hour before it dissipated allowing a view.

“No living creature was in sight! We now perceived that additions had been made to our defences. The dynamite had dug a ditch more than a hundred feet wide, all around us, and cast up an embankment some twenty-five feet high on both borders of it. As to destruction of life, it was amazing. Moreover, it was beyond estimate. Of course we could not count the dead, because they did not exist as individuals, but merely as homogenous protoplasm, with alloys of iron and buttons."

Feeling secure, the Yankee spoke to his “army,” his fifty-two boys, in certain terms that after this victory, none would be left to attack them but the nights – the commoners having left the scene – and that, as for the knights, “We will kill them all.”

He then sends out work crews laboring through the night to prepare the diversion of a mountain brook just south of his defences, “arranging it in such a way that I could make instant use of it in an emergency.” Later . . .

“As soon as it was good and dark, I shut off the current from all of the fences, and then groped my way out to the embankment bordering our side of the great dynamite ditch. I crept to the top of it and lay there on the slant of the muck to watch. But it was too dark to see anything.”

After a long wait . . .

"At last I caught what you may call indistinct glimpses of sound – dulled metallic sound. . . This sound thickened, and approached – from toward the north. Presently I heard it at my own level – the ridge- top of the opposite embankment, a hundred feet or more
away. . . I heard that metallic noise descending into the great ditch. It augmented fast, it spread all along, and it unmistakably furnished me this fact: an armed host was taking up its quarters in the ditch. Yes, these people were arranging a little surprise party for us. . . I groped my way back to the corral, now; I had seen enough. I went to the platform and signaled to turn the current onto the two inner fences. . . It was my notion that as soon as dawn approached we could expect the ditch’s ambuscaded thousands to swarm up over the embankment and make an assault, and be followed immediately by the rest of their army.”


Chapter 43 - The Yankee returns to the cave, turns
off the current on the outer fences, and returns with
Clarence to observe.

We started a whispered conversation, but suddenly
Clarence broke off and said -

“What is that?”

“That thing yonder?”

“What thing? - Where?”

“There beyond you a little piece - a dark something -
a dull shape of some kind - against the second fence.”

I gazed, he gazed. I said:

“Could it be a man, Clarence?”

“No, I think not. If you notice, it looks a lit -
why, it IS a man! - leaning on the fence.”

“I certainly believe it is; let’s go and see.”

We crept along on our hands and knees until we were
pretty close, and then looked up. Yes, it was a man -
a dim great figure in armor, standing erect, with both
hands on the upper wire - and of course there was a
smell of burning flesh. Poor fellow, dead as a
doornail, and never knew what hurt him. He stood
there like a statue - no motion about him, except that
his plumes swished about a little in the night wind.
We rose up and looked in through the bars of his
visor, but couldn’t make out whether we knew him or
not - features too dim and shadowed.

We heard muffled sounds approaching, and we sank down
to the ground where we were. We made out another
knight vaguely; he was coming very stealthily, and
feeling his way. He was near enough now, for us to
see him put out a hand, find an upper wire, then bend
and step over it, then bend and step under it and over
the lower one. Now he arrived at the first knight -
and started slightly when he discovered him. He stood
a moment - no doubt wondering why the other one didn’t
move on; then he said, in a low voice, “Why dreamest
thou here, good Sir Mar-” then he laid his hand on
the corpse’s shoulder - and just uttered a little soft
moan and sunk down dead. Killed by a dead man, you
see - killed by a dead friend, in fact. There was
something awful about it.

Chapter 43 – That night the Yankee and Clarence waited and watched as more and more knights naively joined their dead brethren, electrocuted all along the fence lines.

“We concluded to make a tour between the inner fences. We elected to walk upright, for convenience sake . . . Well, it was a curious trip. Everywhere dead men were lying outside the second fence – not plainly visible, but still visible; and we counted fifteen of those pathetic statues – dead knights standing with their hands on the upper wire. . .

Pretty soon we detected a muffled and heavy sound, and the next moment we guessed what it was. It was a surprise in force coming! . . . we stood by the inner fence and watched the silent lightning do its awful work upon that swarming host. One could make out but little of detail; but he could note that a black mass was piling itself up beyond the second fence. That swelling bulk was dead men! Our camp was enclosed with a solid wall of the dead – a bulwark, a breastwork, of corpses, you may say.

I sent a current through the third fence, now; and almost immediately through the fourth and fifth, so quickly were the gaps filled up. I believed the time was come, now, for my climax; I believed that that whole army was in our trap. Anyway it was high time to find out. So I touched a button and set fifty electric suns aflame on the top of our precipice.

Land, what a sight! We were enclosed in three walls of dead men! All the other fences were pretty nearly filled with the living, who were stealthily working their way forward through the wires. The sudden glare paralyzed this host, petrified them, you may say, with astonishment; there was just one instant for me to utilize their immobility in, and I didn’t lose the chance. You see, in another instant they would have recovered their faculties; then they’d have burst into a cheer and made a rush, and my wires would have gone down before it; but that lost instant lost them their opportunity forever; while even that slight fragment of time was still unspent, I shot the current through all the fences and struck the whole host dead in their tracks. THERE was a groan you could HEAR! It voiced the death-pang of eleven thousand men. It swelled out on the night with awful pathos.”

“A glance showed that the rest of the enemy – perhaps ten thousand strong – were between us and the encircling ditch, and pressing forward to the assault. Consequently we had them ALL! And had them past help. Time for the last act of the tragedy. I fired the three appointed revolver shots – which meant:

‘Turn on the water!’
There was a sudden rush and roar, and in a minute the mountain brook was raging through the big ditch and creating a river a hundred feet wide and twenty-five deep.

‘Stand to your guns, men! Open fire!’

The thirteen gatlings began to vomit death into the fated ten thousand. They halted, they stood their ground a moment against that withering deluge of fire, then they broke, faced about and swept toward the ditch like chaff before a gale. A full fourth part of their force never reached the top of the lofty embankment, the three-fourths reached it and plunged over – to death by drowning.

Within ten short minutes after we had opened fire, armed resistance was totally annihilated, the campaign was ended, we fifty-four were masters of England! Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us.

But how treacherous is fortune! In a little while – say an hour – happened a thing, by my own fault, which – but I have no heart to write that. Let the record end here.

Chapter 44 – “A Postscript by Clarence” - The “conceit” or “gimmick” that has made this whole story possible is the “transposition of epochs – and bodies”; the 19th century Yankee is laid out cold in a New England factory fight, only to wake up in 6th century England.

As part of this “conceit” we also “know” that – except for a brief part at the beginning and again at the end, the entire story is presented from an ancient manuscript shared with Twain by the “Stranger” he meets touring Warwick Castle. Twain reads the manuscript to us throughout the night.

Furthermore, we know by now the import of the Stranger’s cryptic comments uttered on the second page. The castle tour guide is speaking to the tourists:

“Ancient hauberk, date of the sixth century, time of King Arthur and the Round Table; said to have belonged to the knight Sir Sagramour le Desirous; observe the round hole through the chain mail in the left breast [ see: ]; can’t be accounted for; supposed to have been done with a bullet since invention of firearms – perhaps maliciously by Cromwell’s soldiers.”

My acquaintance smiled – not a modern smile, but one that must have gone out of general use many, many centuries ago – and muttered, apparently to himself:

“Wit ye well, I saw it done.” Then, after a pause, added: “ I did it myself.”


The “Stranger,” the owner of the ancient manuscript, is – indeed - the Yankee himself, somehow re- transpositioned into the 19th century. We read the Yankee’s final entry to that manuscript:


“Within ten short minutes after we had opened fire, armed resistance was totally annihilated, the campaign was ended, we fifty-four were masters of England! Twenty-five thousand men lay dead around us.

But how treacherous is fortune! In a little while – say an hour – happened a thing, by my own fault, which – but I have no heart to write that. Let the record end here.”

Chapter 44 – “A Postscript by Clarence” - Clarence explains that the Yankee – as he has done several times throughout the story – naively misjudges the nature of backward humanity:

“He proposed that we two go out and see if any help could be afforded the wounded. I was strenuous against the project.”

But the Yankee (“the Boss”) insisted and:

“The first wounded man who appealed for help, was sitting, with his back against a dead comrade. When the boss bent over him and spoke to him, the man recognized him and stabbed him.”

After dispatching the assailant:

“We carried the Boss to the cave and gave his wound, which was not very serious, the best care we could. In this service we had the help of Merlin, though we did not know it. He was disguised as a woman, and appeared to be a simple old peasant goodwife. In this disguise, with brown-stained face and smooth shaven, he had appeared a few days after the Boss was hurt, and offered to cook for us, saying her people had gone off to join certain new camps which the enemy were forming, and that she was starving. The Boss had been getting along very well, and had amused himself with finishing up his record.

We were glad to have this woman, for we were short handed. We were in a trap, you see – a trap of our own making. If we stayed where we were, our dead would kill us; if we moved out of our defenses, we should no longer be invincible. We had conquered; in turn we were conquered. The Boss recognized this; we all recognized it. If we could go to one of those new camps and patch up some kind of terms with the enemy – yes, but the Boss could not go, and neither could I, for I was among the first that were made sick by the poisonous air bred by those dead thousands. Others were taken down, and still others. To-morrow –

To-morrow. It is here. And with it the end. About midnight I awoke, and saw that hag making curious passes in the air about the Boss’s head and face, and wondered what it meant. . . . The woman ceased from her mysterious foolery, and started tip-toeing toward the door. I called out –

“Stop! What have you been doing?”

She halted, and said with an accent of malicious satisfaction:

“Ye were conquerors; ye are conquered! These others are perishing – you also. Ye shall all die in this place – every one – except him. He sleepeth now – and shall sleep thirteen centuries. I am Merlin!”

Then such a delirium of silly laughter overtook him that he reeled about like a drunken man, and presently fetched up against one of our wires. His mouth is spread open yet; apparently he is still laughing. I suppose the face will retain that petrified laugh until the corpse turns to dust.

The Boss has never stirred – sleeps like a stone. If he does not wake to-day, we shall understand what kind of sleep it is, and his body will then be borne to a place in one of the remote recesses of the cave where none will ever find it to desecrate it. As for the rest of us – well, it is agreed that if any one of us ever escapes alive from this place, he will write the fact here, and loyally hide the Manuscript with the Boss, our dear good chief, whose property it is, be he alive or dead.

END OF MANUSCRIPT.

The book ends with a “Final P.S. by M.T.," Mark Twain (the fictional persona of Samuel Clemens) who received the manuscript from the Stranger:

“The DAWN was come when I laid the Manuscript aside. The rain had almost ceased, the world was gray and sad, the exhausted storm was sighing and sobbing itself to rest. I went to the stranger’s room, and listened at his door, which was slightly ajar; I could hear his voice, and so I knocked. There was no answer, but I still heard the voice. I peeped in. The man lay on his back, in bed, talking brokenly but with spirit, and punctuating with his arms, which he thrashed about, restlessly, as sick people do in delirium. I slipped in softly, and bent over him. His mutterings and ejaculations went on. I spoke – merely a word, to call his attention. His glassy eyes and ashy face were alight in an instant. With pleasure, gratitude, gladness, welcome:

“O, Sandy, you are come at last, - how I have longed for you! Sit by me – do not leave me – never leave me again, Sandy, never again. Where is your hand?- give it me, dear, let me hold it – there – now, all is well, all is peace, and I am happy again – we are happy again, isn’t it so, Sandy? You are so dim, so vague, you are but a mist, a cloud, but you are here, and that is blessedness sufficient; and I have your hand; don’t take it away – it is for only a little while, I shall not require it long . . . . . Was that the child? . . . Hello-Central! . . . . She doesn’t answer. Asleep, perhaps? Bring her when she wakes, and let me touch her hands, her face, her hair, and tell her good-bye . . . . . . . Sandy! . . . . Yes, you are there.I lost myself a moment, and I thought you were gone . . . . . . Have I been sick long? It must be so; it seems months to me. And such dreams! Such strange and awful dreams, Sandy! Dreams that were as real as reality – delirium, of course, but so real! Why, I thought the king was dead, I thought you were in Gaul and couldn’t get home, I thought there was a revolution; in the fantastic frenzy of these dreams, I thought that Clarence and I, and a handful of my cadets fought and exterminated the whole chivalry of England! But even that was not the strangest. I seemed to be a creature out of a remote unborn age, centuries hence, and even that was as real as the rest! Yes, I seemed to have flown back out of that age into this of ours, and then forward to it again, and was set down, a stranger and forlorn in that strange England, with an abyss of thirteen centuries yawning between me and you! Between me and my home and my friends! Between me and all that is dear to me, all that could make life worth the living! It was awful – awfuler than you can ever imagine, Sandy. Ah, watch by me, Sandy – stay by me every moment – don’t let me go out of my mind again; death is nothing, let it come, but not with those dreams, not with the torture of those hideous dreams – I cannot endure that again . . . . . . Sandy? . . . .”

He lay muttering incoherently some little time; then for a time he lay silent, and apparently sinking away toward death. Presently his fingers began to pick busily at the coverlet, and by that sign I knew that his end was at hand. With the first suggestion of the death-rattle in his throat he started up slightly, and seemed to listen; then he said:

“A bugle? . . . . It is the king! The drawbridge, there! Man the battlements! – turn out the –“

He was getting up his last “effect;” but he never finished it.