 CHAPTER XXIII. Saturday noon I went to the well and looked on awhile. Merlin was still burning smoke-powders and pawing the air, and muttering gibberish as hard as ever, but looking pretty down-hearted for, of course, he had not started even a perspiration in that well yet. Finally I said, How does the thing promise by this time, partner? Behold, I am even now busied with trial of the powerfulest enchantment known to the princes of the occult arts in the lands of the east, and it fail me, not can avail. Peace, until I finish!" He raised a smoke this time that darkened all the region, and must have made matters uncomfortable for the hermits, for the wind was their way, and it rolled down over their dens in a dense and billowy fog. He poured out volumes of speech to match, and contorted his body and sawed the air with his hands in a most extraordinary way. At the end of twenty minutes he dropped down panting, and about exhausted. Now arrived the abbot and several hundred monks and nuns, and behind them a multitude of pilgrims and a couple of acres of foundlings, all drawn by the prodigious smoke, and all in a grand state of excitement. The abbot inquired anxiously for results. Merlin said, If any labourer of mortal might break the spell that binds these waters, this which I have but just assayed had done it. It has failed. Whereby I do now know that that which I had feared is a truth established. The sign of this failure is that the most potent spirit known to the magicians of the East, and whose name none may utter and live, has laid his spell upon this well. The mortal does not breathe, nor ever will, who can penetrate the secret of that spell, and without that secret none can break it. The water will flow no more for ever, good father. I have done what man could. Suffer me to go." Of course this threw the abbot into a good deal of consternation. He turned to me with the signs of it in his face, and said, Ye have heard him. Is it true? Part of it is. Not all, then, not all? What part is true? That that spirit with the Russian name has put his spell upon the well. God's wounds, then, are we ruined? Possibly. Not certainly. Ye mean, not certainly? That is it. Wherefore ye also mean that when he saith none can break the spell, yes, when he says that, he says what isn't necessarily true. There are conditions under which an effort to break it may have some chance, that is, some small, some trifling chance of success. The conditions—oh, they are nothing difficult. Only these. I want the well and the surroundings for the space of half a mile entirely to myself, from sunset to day, until I remove the ban, and nobody allowed to cross the ground but by my authority. Are these all? Yes. And you have no fear to try? Oh, none. One may fail, of course, and one may also succeed. One can try, and I am ready to chance it. I have my conditions. These and all others ye may name. I will issue commandment to that effect. Wait, said Merlin, with an evil smile. Ye wit that he that would break the spell must know that spirit's name? Yes, I know his name. And wit you also that to know it, skills not of itself, but ye must likewise pronounce it? Ha, new ye that? Yes, I knew that too. You had that knowledge. Art of fool! Are ye minded to utter that name and die? Utter it? Why, certainly. I would utter it if it was Welsh. Ye are even a deadman, then, and I go to tell Arthur. That's all right. Take your grip-stack and get along. The thing for you to do is to go home and work the weather, John W. Merlin. It was a home shot, and it made him wince, for he was the worst weather failure in the kingdom. Whenever he ordered up the danger signals along the coast, there was a week's dead calm, sure, and every time he prophesied fair weather it rained brick-backs. But I kept him in the weather bureau right along to undermine his reputation. However, that shot raised his bile, and instead of starting home to report my death, he said he would remain and enjoy it. My two experts arrived in the evening, and pretty well fagged, for they had travelled double tides. They had packed meals along, and had brought everything I needed—tools, pump, lead pipe, Greek fire, sheaves of big rockets, Roman candles, colored fire sprays, electric apparatus, and a lot of sundries—everything necessary for the statelyest kind of a miracle. They got their supper and a nap, and about midnight we sallied out through them solitude, so wholly vacant and complete that it quite overpassed the required conditions. We took possession of the well and its surroundings. My boys were experts in all sorts of things, from the stoning up of a well, to the constructing of a mathematical instrument. An hour before sunrise we had that leak mended in ship-shaped fashion, and the water began to rise. Then we stowed our fireworks in the chapel, locked up the place, and went home to bed. Before the noon mass was over we were at the well again, for there was a deal to do yet, and I was determined to spring the miracle before midnight, for business reasons. For whereas a miracle worked for the church on a weekday is worth a good deal, it is worth six times as much if you get it in on a Sunday. In nine hours the water had risen to its customary level, that is to say, it was within twenty-three feet of the top. We put in a little iron pump, one of the first turned out by my works near the capital. We bored into a stone reservoir which stood against the outer wall of the well chamber, and inserted a section of lead pipe that was long enough to reach the door of the chapel, and project beyond the threshold, where the gushing water would be visible to the two hundred and fifty acres of people. I was intending should be present on the flat plain in front of this little holy hillock at the proper time. We knocked the head out of an empty hog's head, and hoisted this hog's head to the flat roof of the chapel, where we clamped it down fast, poured in gunpowder till it lay loosely an inch deep on the bottom, then we stood up rockets in the hog's head as thick as they would loosely stand, all the different breeds of rockets there are, and they made a portly and imposing sheaf, I can tell you. We grounded the wire of a pocket electrical battery in that powder, we placed a whole magazine of Greek fire on each corner of the roof, blue on one corner, green on another, red on another, and purple on the last, and grounded a wire in each. About two hundred yards off in the flat we built a pan of scantlings, about four feet high, and laid planks on it, and so made a platform. We covered it with swell tapestries borrowed for the occasion, and topped it off with the abbot's own throne. When you are going to do a miracle for an ignorant race, you want to get in every detail that will count. You want to make all the properties impressive to the public eye. You want to make matters comfortable for your head guest. Then you can turn yourself loose and play your effects for all they are worth. I know the value of these things, for I know human nature. You can't throw too much style into a miracle. It costs trouble and work and sometimes money, but it pays in the end. Well, we brought the wires to the ground at the chapel, and then brought them under the ground to the platform and hid the batteries there. We put a rope fence a hundred feet square around the platform to keep off the common multitude, and that finished the work. My idea was, doors open at ten thirty, performance to begin at eleven twenty-five sharp. I wished I could charge admission, but of course that wouldn't answer. I instructed my boys to be in the chapel as early as ten, before anybody was around, and be ready to man the pumps at the proper time and make the fur fly. Then we went home to supper. The news of the disaster to the well had traveled far by this time, and now for two or three days a steady avalanche of people had been pouring into the valley. The lower end of the valley was become one huge camp. We should have a good house, no question about that. Criers went the rounds early in the evening and announced the coming attempt, which put every pulse up to fever-heat. They gave notice that the abbot and his official suite would move in state and occupy the platform at ten thirty, up to which time all the region which was under my ban must be clear. The bells would then cease from tolling, and this sign should be permissioned to the multitudes to close in and take their places. I was at the platform, and all ready to do the honors, when the abbot's solemn procession-hove in sight, which it did not do till it was nearly to the rope fence, because it was a starless black night and no torches permitted. With it came Merlin, and took a front seat on the platform. He was as good as his word for once. One could not see the multitudes banked together beyond the ban, but they were there just the same. The moment the bells stopped those banked masses broke and poured over the line like a vast black wave, and for as much as a half-hour it continued to flow, and then it solidified itself, and you could have walked upon a pavement of human heads to, well, miles. We had a solemn stage-wait now for about twenty minutes, a thing I had counted on for effect. It is always good to let your audience have a chance to work up its expectancy. At length, out of the silence, a noble Latin chant, men's voices, broke and swelled up and rolled away into the night, a majestic tide of melody. I had put that up too, and it was one of the best effects I ever invented. When it was finished I stood up on the platform and extended my hands abroad for two minutes, with my face uplifted. That always produces a dead hush, and then slowly pronounced this ghastly word with a kind of awfulness which caused hundreds to tremble and many women to faint. Constantinople the tannish-your-doodle-sacks-for-fifon-marker's-gesellschaft! Just as I was moaning out the closing hunks of that word, I touched off one of my electric connections, and all that murky world of people stood revealed in a hideous blue glare. It was immense that effect. Lots of people shrieked. Women curled up and quit in every direction. Foundlings collapsed by platoons. The abbot and the monks crossed themselves nimbly, and their lips fluttered with agitated prayers. Merlin held his grip, but he was astonished clear down to his corns. He had never seen anything to begin with that before. Now was the time to pile in the effects. I lifted my hands and groaned out this word as it were in agony. Nihilist and dynamite theatres, chikes and spankens, astendens vers sagungen, and turned on the red fire. You should have heard that Atlantic of people moan and howl when that crimson hell joined the blue. After sixty seconds I shouted, Transfaltrupentrupentransportrumpeltheatreibertrungensstreidentragity, and lit up the green fire. After waiting only forty seconds this time, I spread my arms abroad and thundered out the devastating syllables of this word of words. Mekka musul manen masen menken mörder moren mütter mor mor muñumento maher, and whirled on the purple glare. There they were, all going at once red, blue, green, purple. Four furious volcanoes pouring vast clouds of radiant smoke aloft, and spreading a blinding rainbowed noonday to the furthest confines of that valley. In the distance one could see that fellow on the pillar standing rigid against the background of sky, his seesaw stopped for the first time in twenty years. I knew the boys were at the pump now and ready, so I said to the abbot, The time is come, father! I am about to pronounce the dread name and command the spell to dissolve. You want to brace up and take hold of something. Then I shouted to the people, Behold, in another minute the spell will be broken, or no mortal can break it. If it break, all will know it, for you will see the sacred water gush from the chapel door. I stood a few moments to let the hearers have a chance to spread my announcement to those who couldn't hear, and so convey it to the furthest ranks. Then I made a grand exhibition of extra posturing and gesturing, and shouted, Lo! I command the fell spirit that possesses the holy fountain to now disgorge into the skies all the infernal fires that still remain in him, and straightway dissolve his spell and flee hence to the pit, there to lie bound a thousand years. By his own dread name I command it. Then I touched off the hog's head of rockets, and a vast fountain of dazzling lances of fire vomited itself toward the zenith with a hissing rush and burst in mid-sky into a storm of flashing jewels. One mighty groan of terror started up from the masked people, then suddenly broke into a wild hosanna of joy, for there, fair and plain in the uncanny glare they saw the freed water leaping forth. The old abbot could not speak a word for tears and the choking in his throat, without utterance of any sort he folded me in his arms and mashed me. It was more eloquent than speech, and harder to get over, too, in a country where there were really no doctors that were worth a damaged nickel. You should have seen those acres of people throw themselves down in that water and kiss it, kiss it, and pet it, and fondle it, and talk to it as if it were alive, and welcome it back with the dear names they gave their darlings, just as if it had been a friend who was long gone away and lost and was come home again. Yes, it was pretty to see, and made me think more of them than I had done before. I sent Merlin home on a shutter. He had caved in and gone down like a landslide when I pronounced that fearful name, and had never come to since. He never had heard that name before, neither had I, but to him it was the right one. Any jumble would have been the right one. He admitted afterward that the spirit's own mother could not have pronounced that name better than I did. He never could understand how I survived it, and I didn't tell him. It is only young magicians that give away a secret like that. Merlin spent three months working enchantments to try to find out the deep trick of how to pronounce that name and outlive it. But he didn't arrive. When I started to the chapel, the populace uncovered and fell back reverently to make a wide way for me, as if I had been some kind of a superior being. And I was. I was aware of that. I took along a night shift of monks and taught them the mystery of the pump, and set them to work, for it was plain that a good part of the people out there were going to sit up with the water all night. Consequently it was but right that they should have all they wanted of it. To those monks that pump was a good deal of a miracle itself, and they were full of wonder over it, and of admiration, too, of the exceeding effectiveness of its performance. It was a great night. An immense night. There was reputation in it. I could hardly get to sleep for glorying over it. CHAPTER XXIV A Rival Magician My influence in the Valley of Holiness was something prodigious now. It seemed worthwhile to try to turn it to some valuable account. The thought came to me the next morning, and was suggested by my seeing one of my knights who was in the soap-line come riding in. According to history, the monks of this place, two centuries before, had been worldly-minded enough to want to wash. It might be that there was eleven of this unrighteousness still remaining. So I sounded a brother, wouldn't you like a bath? He shuddered at the thought, the thought of the peril of it to the well, but he said with feeling, one needs not to ask that have a poor body who has not known that blessed refreshment, sith that he was a boy. Would God I might wash me? But it may not be fair, sir. Tempt me not. It is forbidden." And then he sighed in such a sorrowful way that I was resolved he should have at least one layer of his real estate removed, if it sized up my whole influence and bankrupted the pile. So I went to the abbot, and asked for a permit for this brother. He blanched at the idea. I don't mean that you could see him blench, for, of course, you couldn't see it without you scraped him, and I didn't care enough about it to scrape him, but I knew the blench was there just the same, and within a book's cover's thickness of the surface too, blenched and trembled. He said, Ah, son, ask ought else thou wilt, and it is thine, and freely granted out of a grateful heart, but this, oh, this, would you drive away the blessed water again? No, Father, I will not drive it away. I have mysterious knowledge which teaches me that there was an error that other time when it was thought the institution of the bath banished the fountain. A large interest began to show up in the old man's face. My knowledge informs me that the bath was innocent of that misfortune, which was caused by quite another sort of sin. These are brave words, but, ah, but right welcome if they be true. They are true indeed. Let me build the bath again, Father. Let me build it again, and the fountain shall flow for ever. You promise this? You promise this? Say the word. Say you promise it. I do promise it. Then will I have the first bath myself. Go, get ye to your work. Tarry not, tarry not, but go! I and my boys were at work straight off. The ruins of the old bath were there yet in the basement of the monastery, not a stone missing. They had been left just so, all these lifetimes, and avoided with a pious fear as things accursed. In two days we had it all done and the water in—a spacious pool of clear, pure water that a body could swim in. It was running water, too. It came in and went out through the ancient pipes. The old abbot kept his word and was the first to try it. He went down black and shaky, leaving the whole black community above troubled and worried and full of boatings. But he came back white and joyful, and the game was made. Another triumph scored. It was a good campaign that we made in that valley of holiness, and I was very well satisfied and ready to move on now, but I struck a disappointment. I caught a heavy cold, and it started up an old lurking rheumatism of mine. Of course the rheumatism hunted up my weakest place and located itself there. This was the place where the abbot put his arms about me and mashed me. What time he was moved to testify his gratitude to me with an embrace. And at last I got out. I was a shadow. But everybody was full of attentions and kindnesses, and these brought cheer back into my life, and were the right medicine to help a convalescent swiftly up toward health and strength again. So I gained fast. Sandy was worn out with nursing, so I made up my mind to turn out and go a cruise alone, leaving her at the nunnery to rest up. My idea was to disguise myself as a free man of peasant degree and wander through the country a week or two on foot. This would give me a chance to eat and lodge with the lowliest and poorest class of free citizens on equal terms. There was no other way to inform myself perfectly of their everyday life and the operation of the laws upon it. If I went among them as a gentleman there would be restraints and conventionalities which would shut me out from their private joys and troubles, and I would get no further than the outside shell. One morning I was out on a long walk to get up muscle for my trip, and had climbed the ridge which bordered the northern extremity of the valley, when I came upon an artificial opening in the face of a low precipice and recognized it by its location as a hermitage which had often been pointed out to me from a distance as the den of a hermit of high renown for dirt and austerity. I knew he had lately been offered a situation in the great Sahara where lions and sand flies made the hermit life peculiarly attractive and difficult, and had gone to Africa to take possession, so I thought I would look in and see how the atmosphere of this den agreed with its reputation. My surprise was great. The place was newly swept and scoured. Then there was another surprise. Back in the gloom of the cavern I heard the clink of a little bell, and then this exclamation. Hello, Central! Is this you, Camelot? Behold, thou mayst glad thy heart, and thou hast faith to believe the wonderful when that cometh in the unexpected guise, and maketh itself manifest in impossible places. Here standeth in the flesh his mightiness the boss, and with thine own ear shall ye hear him speak. Now what a radical reversal of things this was! What a jumbling together of extravagant incongruities! What a fantastic conjunction of opposites and irreconcilables! The home of the bogus miracle become the home of a real one! The den of a midi-evil hermit turned into a telephone office? The telephone clerk stepped into the light, and I recognized one of my young fellows. I said, How long has this office been established here, Ulfius? But since midnight, fair Serbos, and it please you, we saw many lights in the valley, and so judged it well to make a station, for that where so many lights be, needs must they indicate a town of goodly size. Quite right. It isn't a town in the customary sense, but it's a good stand, anyway. Do you know where you are? Of that I have had no time to make inquiry, for when as my comradeship moved hence upon their labours, leaving me in charge, I got me into needed rest, proposing to inquire when I waked, and report the place's name to Camelot for record. Well, this is the valley of holiness. It didn't take. I mean, he didn't start at the name, as I had supposed he would. He merely said, I will so report it. Why, the surrounding regions are filled with a noise of late wonders that have happened here. You didn't hear of them? Ah! ye will remember we moved by night and avoid speech with all. We learn not but that we get by the telephone from Camelot. Why, they know all about this thing. Haven't they told you anything about the great miracle of the restoration of a holy fountain? Oh! that! Indeed, yes. But the name of this valley doth woundily differ from the name of that one. Indeed, to differ wider were not possible—what was the name, then? The valley of hellishness. That explains it. Confound a telephone, anyway. It is the very demon for conveying similarities of sound that are miracles of divergence from similarity of sense. But no matter, you know the name of the place now. Call up Camelot. He did it, and had Clarence sent for. It was good to hear my boy's voice again. It was like being home. After some affectionate interchanges and some account of my late illness, I said, What is new? The king and queen and many of the court do start even in this hour to go to your valley to pay pious homage to the waters ye have restored, and cleanse themselves of sin, and see the place where the infernal spirit spouted true hell-flames to the clouds. And ye listen sharply, ye may hear me wink and hear me, likewise, smile a smile, since it was I that made selection of those flames from out of our stock and sent them by your order. Does the king know the way to this place? The king? No, nor to any other in his realms, may But the lads that hope you with your miracle will be his guide and lead the way, and appoint the places for rests at noons and sleeps at night. This will bring them here when? Mid-afternoon or later the third day. Anything else in the way of news? The king hath begun the raising of the standing army he suggested to him. One regiment is complete and officered. The mischief! I wanted a main hand in that myself. There is only one body of men in the kingdom that are fitted to officer a regular army. Yes, and now you will marvel to know there's not so much as one west-pointer in that regiment. What are you talking about? Are you an earnest? It is truly as I have said. Why, this is making me uneasy. Who were chosen, and what was the method? Competitive examination? Indeed, I know not of the method. I but know this. These officers be all of noble family and are born—what is it you call it? Chuckleheads. There's something wrong, Clarence. Comfort yourself, then, for two candidates for a lieutenancy do travel hencewith the king. Young nobles both, and if you but wait where you are you will hear them questioned. That is news to the purpose. I will get one west-pointer in, anyway. Mount a man and send him to that school with a message. Let him kill horses if necessary, but he must be there before sunset tonight and say, There is no need. I have laid a ground wire to the school. Prithee, let me connect you with it. Sounded good. In this atmosphere of telephones and lightning communication with distant regions, I was breathing the breath of life again after long suffocation. I realized then what a creepy, dull, inanimate horror this land had been to me all these years, and how I had been in such a stifled condition of mind as to have grown used to it almost beyond the power to notice it. I gave my order to the superintendent of the academy, personally. I also asked him to bring me some paper and a fountain pen and a box or so of safety matches. I was getting tired of doing without these conveniences. I could have them now, as I wasn't going to wear armour any more at present, and therefore could get at my pockets. When I got back to the monastery I found a thing of interest going on. The abbot and his monks were assembled in the great hall observing with childish wonder and faith the performances of a new magician, a fresh arrival. His dress was the extreme of the fantastic, as showy and foolish as the sort of thing an Indian medicine man wears. He was mowing and mumbling and gesticulating and drawing mystical figures in the air and on the floor, the regular thing, you know. He was a celebrity from Asia, so he said, and that was enough. That sort of evidence was as good as gold and past current everywhere. How easy and cheap it was to be a great magician on this fellow's terms! His specialty was to tell you what any individual on the face of the globe was doing at the moment, and what he had done at any time in the past, and what he would do at any time in the future. He asked if any would like to know what the Emperor of the East was doing now. The sparkling eyes and the delighted rubbing of hands made eloquent answer. This reverent crowd would like to know what that monarch was at just at this moment. The fraud went through some more mummery and then made grave announcement. The High and Mighty Emperor of the East doth at this moment put money in the palm of a holy begging fryer. One, two, three pieces, and they be all of silver. A buzz of admiring exclamations broke out all around. It is marvellous, wonderful, what study, what labor to have acquired of them! So amazing power is this! Would they like to know what the Supreme Lord of Ind was doing? Yes, he told them what the Supreme Lord of Ind was doing. Then he told them what the Sultan of Egypt was at, also what the King of the remote seas was about, and so on and so on. And with each new marvel the astonishment, his accuracy rose higher and higher. They thought he must surely strike an uncertain place some time, but no, he never had to hesitate. He always knew, and always with unerring precision. I saw that if this thing went on I should lose my supremacy. This fellow would capture my following. I should be left out in the cold. I must put a cog in his wheel and do it right away, too. I said, If I may ask, I should very greatly like to know what a certain person is doing. Speak, and freely I will tell you. It will be difficult, perhaps impossible. My art knows not the word. The more difficult it is, the more certainly will I reveal it to you. You see, I was working up the interest. It was getting pretty high, too. You could see that by the craning necks all around, and the half-suspended breathing. So now I climaxed it. If you make no mistake, if you tell me truly what I want to know, I will give you two hundred silver pennies. The fortune is mine. I will tell you what you would know. Then tell me what I am doing with my right hand. Ah! there was a general gasp of surprise. It had not occurred to anybody in the crowd that simple trick of inquiring about somebody who wasn't ten thousand miles away. The magician was hit hard. It was an emergency that had never happened in his experience before, and it corked him. He didn't know how to meet it. He looked stunned, confused. He couldn't say a word. Come, I said. What are you waiting for? Is it possible you can answer up, write off, and tell what anybody on the other side of the earth is doing, and yet can't tell what a person is doing who isn't three yards from you? Persons behind me know what I am doing with my right hand. They will endorse you if you tell correctly. He was still dumb. Very well. I'll tell you why you don't speak up and tell. It is because you don't know. You, a magician. Good friends, this tramp is a mere fraud and liar. This distressed the monks and terrified them. They were not used to hearing these awful beings called names, and they did not know what might be the consequence. There was a dead silence now. Superstitious boatings were in every mind. The magician began to pull his wits together, and when he presently smiled an easy nonchalant smile it spread a mighty relief around, for it indicated that his mood was not destructive. He said, It hath struck me speechless the frivolity of this person's speech. Let all know, per chance there be any who know it not, that enchanters of my degree deign not to concern themselves with the doings of any but kings, princes, emperors, them that be born in the purple, and them only. Had ye asked me what Arthur the Great King is doing it were another matter, and I had told ye, but the doings of a subject interest me not. Oh, I misunderstood you. I thought you said anybody, and so I supposed anybody included, well, anybody that is everybody. It doth anybody that is of lofty birth, and the better if he be royal. That it besemoth might be well, said the abbot, who saw his opportunity to smooth things and avert disaster, for it were not likely that so wonderful a gift as this would be conferred for the revelation of the concerns of lesser beings than such as be born near to the summits of greatness. Our Arthur the King, would you know of him? Broke in the enchanter. Most gladly ye, and gratefully. Everybody was full of awe and interest again, right away, the incorrigible idiots. They watched the incantations absorbingly, and looked at me with a, there, now, what can you say to that, air, when the announcement came? The King is weary with the chase, and lieth in his palace these two hours sleeping a dreamless sleep. God's benison upon him, said the abbot, and crossed himself. May that sleep be to the refreshment of his body and his soul! And so it might be if he were sleeping, I said, but the King is not sleeping, the King rides. Here was trouble again, a conflict of authority. Nobody knew which of us to believe. I still had some reputation left. The magician's scorn was stirred, and he said, Lo, I have seen many wonderful soothsayers and prophets and magicians in my life days, but none before that could sit idle and see to the heart of things with never an incantation to help. You have lived in the woods and lost much by it. I use incantations myself, as this good brotherhood are aware, but only on occasions of moment. When it comes to sarcasming, I reckon I know how to keep my end up. That jab made this fellow squirm. The abbot inquired after the Queen and the court, and got this information. They be all on sleep, being overcome by fatigue, like as to the King. I said, That is merely another lie. Half of them are about their amusements. The Queen and the other half are not sleeping, they ride. Now perhaps you can spread yourself a little and tell us where the King and Queen and all that are this moment riding with them are going. They sleep now, as I said, but on the morrow they will ride, for they go a journey toward the sea. And where will they be the day after tomorrow at Vespers? Far to the north of Camelot, and half their journey will be done. That is another lie by the space of a hundred and fifty miles. Their journey will not be merely half done, it will be all done, and they will be here in this valley. That was a noble shot. It set the abbot and the monks in a whirl of excitement, and it rocked the enchanter to his base. I followed the thing right up. If the King does not arrive, I will have myself ridden on a rail. If he does, I will ride you on a rail instead. Next day I went up to the telephone office, and found that the King had passed through two towns that were on the line. I spotted his progress on the succeeding day in the same way. I kept these matters to myself. The third day's reports showed that, if he kept up his gate, he would arrive by four in the afternoon. There was still no sign anywhere of interest in his coming. There seemed to be no preparations making to receive him in state. A strange thing, truly. Only one thing could explain this. That other magician had been cutting under me, sure. This was true. I asked a friend of mine, a monk, about it, and he said, yes, the magician had tried some further enchantments, and found out that the court had concluded to make no journey at all, but stay at home. Think of that! Observe how much a reputation was worth in such a country. These people had seen me do the very showiest bit of magic in history, and the only one within their memory that had a positive value, and yet here they were, ready to take up with an adventurer who could offer no evidence of his powers but his mere, unproven word. However, it was not good politics to let the king come without any fuss and feathers at all, so I went down and drummed up a procession of pilgrims, and smoked out a batch of hermits, and started them out at two o'clock to meet him. And that was the sort of state he arrived in. The abbot was helpless with rage and humiliation when I brought him out on a balcony and showed him the head of the state, marching in and never a monk on hand to offer him welcome, and no stir of life or clang of joy-bell to glad his spirit. He took one look and then flew to rouse out his forces. The next minute the bells were dinning furiously, and the various buildings were vomiting monks and nuns who went swarming in a rush toward the coming procession, and with them went that magician, and he was on a rail, too, by the abbot's order, and his reputation was in the mud, and mine was in the sky again. Yes, a man can keep his trademark current in such a country, but he can't sit around and do it. He has got to be on deck and attending to business right along. When the king travelled for change of air, or made a progress, or visited a distant noble whom he wished to bankrupt with the cost of his keep, part of the administration moved with him. It was a fashion of the time. The commission charged with the examination of candidates for posts in the army came with the king to the valley, whereas they could have transacted their business just as well at home. And although this expedition was strictly a holiday excursion for the king, he kept some of his business functions going just the same. He touched for the evil as usual. He held court in the gate at sunrise and tried cases, for he was himself chief justice of the king's bench. He shone very well in this latter office. He was a wise and humane judge, and he clearly did his honest best and fairest, according to his lights. That is a large reservation. His lights—I mean, his rearing—often coloured 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 slaveholders' moral perceptions are known and conceded, the world over. And a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name. This has a harsh sound, and yet should not be offensive to any, even to the noble himself, unless the fact itself be an 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 slaveholders' spirit, the slaveholders' blunted feeling. They are the result of the same cause in both cases, the possessor's old and inbred custom of regarding himself as a superior being. The king's judgments wrought frequent injustices, but it was merely the fault of his training, his natural and unalterable sympathies. He was as unfitted for a judgeship as would be the average mother for the position of milk-distributor to starving children in famine-time. Her own children would fare a shade better than the rest. One very curious case came before the king. A young girl, an orphan, who had a considerable estate, married a fine young fellow who had nothing. The girl's property was within a scenery held by the church. The bishop of the diocese, an arrogant scion of the great nobility, claimed the girl's estate on the ground that she had married privately, and thus had cheated the church out of one of its rites as lord of the scenery, the one heretofore referred to as the droid du seneur. The penalty of refusal or avoidance was confiscation. The girl's defense was that the lordship of the scenery was vested in the bishop, and the particular right here involved was not transferable, but must be exercised by the lord himself or stand vacated, and that an older law of the church itself strictly barred the bishop from exercising it. It was a very odd case, indeed. It reminded me of something I had read in my youth about the ingenious way in which the aldermen of London raised the money that built the mansion-house. A person who had not taken the sacrament according to the Anglican rite could not stand as a candidate for sheriff of London. Thus dissenters were ineligible. They could not run if asked. They could not serve if elected. The aldermen, who without any question were Yankees in disguise, hid upon this neat device. They passed a by-law imposing a fine of four hundred pounds upon any one who should refuse to be a candidate for sheriff, and a fine of six hundred pounds upon any person who, after being elected sheriff, refused to serve. Then they went to work and elected a lot of dissenters, one after another, and kept it up until they had collected fifteen thousand pounds in fines. And there stands the stately mansion- house to this day, to keep the blushing citizen in mind of a long past and lamented day when a band of Yankees slipped into London and played games of the sort that has given their race a unique and shady reputation among all truly good and holy peoples that be in the earth. The girl's case seemed strong to me. The bishop's case was just as strong. I did not see how the king was going to get out of this hall. But he got out. I depended his decision. Truly I find small difficulty here, the matter being even a child's affair for simpleness. And the young bride had conveyed notice, as in duty bound to her feudal lord and proper master and protector, the bishop, she had suffered no loss for the said bishop could have got a dispensation making him, for temporary convenience, eligible to the exercise of his said right, and thus would she have kept all she had. Whereas failing in her first duty, she hath by that failure failed in all, for whoso clinging to a rope, severeth it above his hands, must fall. It being no defence to claim that the rest of the rope is sound, neither any deliverance from his peril as he shall find. Already the woman's case is rotten at the source. It is the decree of the court that she forfeit to the said lord bishop all her goods, even to the last farthing that she doth possess, and be there to mulked it in the costs. Next. Here was a tragic end to a beautiful honeymoon not yet three months old. Poor young creatures, they had lived these three months lapped to the lips in worldly comforts. These clothes and trinkets they were wearing were as fine and dainty as the shrewdest stretch of the sumptuary laws allowed to people of their degree. And in these pretty clothes, she crying on his shoulder, and he trying to comfort her with hopeful words set to the music of despair, they went from the judgment seat out into the world homeless, bedless, breadless. Why, the very beggars by the road-sides were not so poor as they. Well, the king was out of the whole, and on terms, satisfactory to the church, and the rest of the aristocracy no doubt. Men write many fine and plausible arguments in support of monarchy, but the fact remains that where every man in a state has a vote, brutal laws are impossible. Arthur's people were, of course, poor material for a republic, because they had been debased so long by monarchy, and yet even they would have been intelligent enough to make short work of that law which the king had just been administering if it had been submitted to their full and free vote. There is a phrase which has grown so common in the world's mouth that has come to seem to have sense and meaning. The sense and meaning implied when it is used. That is the phrase which refers to this or that or the other nation as possibly being capable of self-government. And the implied sense of it is that there has been a nation somewhere, some time or other which wasn't capable of it, wasn't as able to govern itself as some self-appointed specialist were or would be to govern it. The masterminds of all nations in all ages have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nation and from the mass of the nation only, not from its privileged classes, and so no matter what the nation's intellectual grade was, whether high or low, the bulk of its ability was in the long ranks of its nameless and its poor, and so it never saw the day that it had not the material in abundance whereby to govern itself, which is to assert an always self-proven fact that even the best-governed and most free and most enlightened monarchy is still behind the best condition attainable by its people, and that the same is true of kindred governments of lower grades all the way down to the lowest. King Arthur had hurried up the army business altogether beyond my calculations. I had not supposed he would move in the matter while I was away, and so I had not mapped out a scheme for determining the merits of officers. I had only remarked that it would be wise to submit every candidate to a sharp and searching examination, and privately I meant to put together a list of military qualifications that nobody could answer to but my West Pointers. That ought to have been attended to before I left, for the King was so taken with the idea of a standing army that he couldn't wait but must get about it at once, and get up as good a scheme of examination as he could invent out of his own head. I was impatient to see what this was, and to show, too, how much more admirable was the one which I should display to the examining board. I intimated this gently to the King, and it fired his curiosity. When the board was assembled, I followed him in, and behind us came the candidates. One of these candidates was a bright young West Pointer of mine, and with him were a couple of my West Point professors. When I saw the board, I did not know whether to cry or to laugh. The head of it was the officer known to later centuries as Norroy King at Arms. The two other members were chiefs of bureaus in his department, and all three were priests, of course—all officials who had to know how to read and write were priests. My candidate was called first, out of courtesy to me, and the head of the board opened on him with official solemnity. The King was staggered from his summit to his foundations. One clerk fainted, and the others came near it. The chairman pulled himself together and said indignantly, It is sufficient. Get you hence. But I appealed to the King. I begged that my candidate might be examined. The King was willing, but the board, who were all well-born folk, implored the King to spare them the indignity of examining the weaver's son. I knew they didn't know enough to examine him anyway, so I joined my prayers to theirs, and the King turned the duty over to my professors. I had had a blackboard prepared, and it was put up now, and the circus began. It was beautiful to hear the lad lay out the science of war, and wallow in details of battle and siege, of supply, transportation, mining, and counter-mining, grand tactics, big strategy and little strategy, signal service, infantry, cavalry, artillery, and all about siege guns, field guns, gatling guns, rifled guns, smooth bores, musket practice, revolver practice, and not a solitary word of it all could these catfish make head or tail of, you understand, and it was handsome to see him chalk off mathematical nightmares on the blackboard that would stump the angels themselves and do it like nothing, too, all about eclipses and comets and solstices and constellations and mean time and sidereal time and dinner time and bedtime and every other imaginable thing above the clouds or under them that you could harry or bully rag an enemy with and make him wish he hadn't come, and when the boy made his military salute and stood aside at last, I was proud enough to hug him, and all those other people were so dazed they looked partly petrified, partly drunk, and wholly caught out and snowed under. I judged that the cake was ours, and by a large majority. Education is a great thing. This was the same youth who had come to West Point so ignorant that when I asked him, if a general officer should have a horse shot under him on the field of battle, what ought he to do? Answered up naively and said, get up and brush himself. One of the young nobles was called up now. I thought I would question him a little myself. I said, can your lordship read? His face flushed indignantly and he fired this at me. Takeest me for a clock? I traw I am not of a blood that. Answer the question. He crowded his wrath down and made out to answer. No. Can you write? He wanted to resent this, too, but I said, you will confine yourself to the questions and make no comments. You are not here to air your blood or your graces, and nothing of the sort will be permitted. Can you write? No. Do you know the multiplication table? I wit not what ye refer to. How much is nine times six? It is a mystery that is hidden from me by reason that the emergency requiring the fathoming of it hath not in my life-days occurred, and so not having no need to know this thing I abide barren of the knowledge. If A. trade a barrel of onions to B, worth two pence the bushel, in exchange for a sheep worth four pence, and a dog worth a penny, and C kill the dog before delivery, because, bitten by the same, whom mistook him for D, what sum is still due to A from B, and which party pays for the dog C or D, and who gets the money? If A is the penny sufficient, or may he claim consequential damages in the form of additional money to represent the possible profit which might have enured from the dog, and classifiable as earned increment that is to say usufruct. Fairly, in the all-wise and unknowable providence of God, who moveth in mysterious ways his wonders to perform, have I never heard the fellow to this question for confusion of the mind and congestion of the ducts of thought. Wherefore I beseech you, let the dog and the onions and these people of the strange and godless names work out their several salvations from their piteous and wonderful difficulties without help of mine, for indeed their trouble is sufficient as it is, whereas I tried to help, I should but damage their cause the more, and yet may have not lived myself to see the dissolution wrought. What do you know of the laws of attraction and gravitation? If there be such, may have his Grace the King did promulgate them whilst that I lay sick about the beginning of the year, and thereby fail to hear his proclamation. What do you know of the science of optics? I know of governors of places, and Seneschals of castles, and sheriffs of counties, and many like small offices and titles of honour, but him you call the science of optics I have not heard of before. Peradventure it is a new dignity. Yes, in this country, try to conceive of this mollusk gravely applying for an official position of any kind under the sun. Why, he had all the earmarks of a typewriter copyist, if you leave out the disposition to contribute uninvited emendations of your grammar and punctuation. It was unaccountable that he didn't attempt a little help of that sword out of his majestic supply of incapacity for the job. But that didn't prove that he hadn't material in him for the disposition, it only proved that he wasn't a typewriter copyist yet. After nagging him a little more, I let the professors loose on him and they turned him inside out, on the line of scientific war, and found him empty, of course. He knew somewhat about the warfare of the time, bushwhacking around for ogres and bullfights in the tournament ring and such things, but otherwise he was empty and useless. Then we took the other young noble in hand, and he was the first one's twin for ignorance and incapacity. I delivered them into the hands of the chairman of the board with the comfortable consciousness that their cake was dough. They were examined in the previous order of precedence. Name, so you please. Pertipol, son of Sir Pertipol, Baron of Barley-Mash. Grandfather, also Sir Pertipol, Baron of Barley-Mash. Great grandfather? The same name and title. Great, great grandfather? We had none, worshipful Sir, the line failing before it had reached so far back. It mattereth not. It is a good four generations, and fulfileth the requirements of the rule. Fulfills what rule, I asked? The rule requiring four generations of nobility, or else the candidate is not eligible. A man not eligible for a lieutenancy in the army unless he can prove four generations of noble descent? Even so, neither lieutenant nor any other officer may be commissioned without that qualification. Oh, come, this is an astonishing thing. What good is such a qualification as that? What good? It is a hardy question, fair sir and boss, since it doth go far to impugn the wisdom of even-arm holy mother-church herself. As how? For that she hath established the self-same rule regarding saints. By her law none may be canonized until he hath lain dead four generations. I see. I see. It is the same thing. It is wonderful. In the one case a man lies dead alive four generations, mummified in ignorance and sloth, and that qualifies him to command live people, and take their wheel and woe into his impotent hands. And in the other case a man lies bedded with death and worms four generations, and that qualifies him for office in the celestial camp. Does the king's grace approve of this strange law? Why truly I see not about it that his strange all places of honor and of profit do belong by natural right to them that be of noble blood. And so these dignities in the army are their property, and would be so without this or any rule. The rule is but to mark a limit. Its purpose is to keep out two recent blood, which would bring in to contempt these offices, and men of lofty lineage would turn their backs and scorn to take them. I would blame and I permitted this calamity. You can permit it, and you are minded so to do, for you have the delegated authority, but that the king should do it were a most strange madness and not comprehensible to any. I yield. Proceed, sir chief of the Haralds College. The chairman resumed as follows. By what illustrious achievement for the honor of the throne and state did the founder of your great line lift himself to the sacred dignity of the British nobility? He built a brewery. Sire, the board finds this candidate perfect in all the requirements and qualifications for military command, and doth hold his case open for a decision after due examination of his competitor. The competitor came forward and proved exactly four generations of nobility himself, so there was a tie in military qualifications that far. He stood aside a moment, and Sire Pettipole was questioned further. Of what condition was the wife of the founder of your line? She came of the highest landed gentry, yet she was not noble. She was gracious and pure and charitable, of a blameless life and character in so much that in these regards was she peer of the best lady in the land. That will do. Stand down. He called up the competing lordling again and asked, What was the rank and condition of the great grandmother who conferred British nobility upon your great house? She was a King's Lehman, and did climb to that splendid eminence by her own uphold and merit from the sewer where she was born. Ah, this indeed is true nobility. This is the right and perfect intermixture. The lieutenancy is yours, fair lord. Hold it not in contempt. It is the humble step which will lead to grandeur's more worthy of the splendor of an origin like to thine. I was down in the bottomless pit of humiliation. I had promised myself an easy and zenith-scouring triumph, and this was the outcome. I was almost ashamed to look my poor, disappointed cadet in the face. I told him to go home and be patient. This wasn't the end. I had a private audience with the King, and made a proposition. I said it was quite right to officer that regiment with nobilities, and he couldn't have done a wiser thing. It would also be a good idea to add five hundred officers to it. In fact, I had as many officers as there were nobles and relatives of nobles in the country, even if there should finally be five times as many officers as privates in it, and thus make it the crack regiment, the envied regiment, the King's own regiment, and entitled to fight on its own hook and in its own way, and go wither it would and come when it pleased in time of war, and be utterly swell and independent. This would make that regiment the heart's desire of all the nobility, and they would all be satisfied and happy. Then we would make up the rest of the standing army out of commonplace materials, and officer it with nobodies, as was proper. Nobodies selected on a basis of mere efficiency, and we would make this regiment tow the line. Allow it no aristocratic freedom from restraint, and force it to do all the work and persistent hammering, to the end that whenever the King's own was tired and wanted to go off for a change, and rummage around amongst ogres, and have a good time, it could go without uneasiness, knowing that matters were in safe hands behind it, and business going to be continued at the old stand, same as usual. The King was charmed with the idea. When I noticed that, it gave me a valuable notion. I thought I saw my way out of an old and stubborn difficulty at last. You see, the royalties of the Pendragon stock were a long-lived race and very fruitful. Whenever a child was born to any of these, and it was pretty often, there was wild joy in the nation's mouth, and piteous sorrow in the nation's heart. The joy was questionable, but the grief was honest. Because the event meant another call for a royal grant. Long was the list of these royalties, and they were a heavy and steadily increasing burden upon the treasury and a menace to the crown. Yet Arthur could not believe this latter fact, and he would not listen to any of my various projects for substituting something in the place of the royal grants. If I could have persuaded him to now and then provide a support for one of these outlying scions, from his own pocket, I could have made a grant to do over it, and it would have had a good effect with the nation. But no, he wouldn't hear of such a thing. He had something like a religious passion for royal grant. He seemed to look upon it as a sort of sacred swag, and one could not irritate him in any way so quickly and so surely as by an attack upon that venerable institution. If I ventured to cautiously hint that there was not another respectable family in England that would humble itself to hold out the hat, however that is as far as I ever got, he always cut me short there and peremptorily too. But I believed I saw my chance at last. I would form this crack regiment out of officers alone, not a single private. Half of it would consist of nobles who should fill all the places up to major general and serve gratis and pay their own expenses, and they would be glad to do this when they should learn that the rest of the regiment would consist exclusively of princes of the blood. These princes of the blood should range and rank from lieutenant general up to field marshal, and be gorgeously salaried and equipped and fed by the state. Moreover, and this was the master-stroke, it should be decreed that these princely grandees should be always addressed by a stunningly gaudy and all compelling title, which I would presently invent, and they and they only in all England should be so addressed. Finally, all princes of the blood should have free choice. Join that regiment, get that great title, and renounce the royal grant, or stay out and receive a grant. Neatest touch of all, unborn but imminent princes of the blood could be born into the regiment, and start fair with good wages and a permanent situation upon due notice from the parents. All the boys would join, I was sure of that, so all existing grants would be relinquished, that the newly born would always join was equally certain. Within sixty days that quaint and bizarre anomaly the royal grant would cease to be a living fact and take its place among the curiosities of the past. CHAPTER XXVI. The first newspaper. When I told the king, I was going out disguised as a petty freeman to scour the country and familiarize myself with the humbler life of the people. He was all afire with the novelty of the thing in a minute, and was bound to take a chance in the adventure himself. Nothing should stop him. He would drop everything and go along. It was the prettiest idea he had run across for many a day. He wanted to glide out the back way and start at once, but I showed him that that wouldn't answer. You see, he was billed for the king's evil, to touch for it, I mean, and it wouldn't be right to disappoint the house, and it wouldn't make a delay worth considering anyway. It was only a one-night stand, and I thought he ought to tell the queen he was going away. He clouded up that and looked sad. I was sorry I'd spoken, especially when he said mournfully, Thou forgettest that Lancelot is here, and where Lancelot is, she noticed not the going forth of the king, nor what day he returneth. Of course I changed the subject. Yes, Guinevere was beautiful, it is true, but take her all round she was pretty slack. I never meddled in these matters. They weren't my affair, but I did hate to see the way things were going on, and I don't mind saying that much. Many's the time she had asked me, Sir Boss, hast seems Sir Lancelot bout? But if ever she went fretting round for the king, I didn't happen to be around at the time. There was a very good layout for the king's evil business, very tidy and creditable. The king sat under a canopy of state, about him were clustered a large body of the clergy in full canonicals. Conspicuous, both for location and personal outfit, stood Maranel, a hermit of the quack doctor species, to introduce the sick, all abroad over the spacious floor, and clear down to the doors in a thick jumble lay or sat the scruffulous under a strong light. It was as good as a tableau, in fact, it had all the look of being gotten up for that, though it wasn't. There were eight hundred sick people present. The work was slow. It lacked the interest of novelty for me, because I had seen the ceremonies before. The thing soon became tedious. But the proprieties required me to stick it out. The doctor was there for the reason that in all such crowds there were many people who only imagined something was the matter with them, and many who were consciously sound, but wanted the immortal honour of fleshly contact with a king, and yet others who pretended to illness in order to get the piece of coin that went with the touch. Up to this time this coin had been a wee little gold piece worth about a third of a dollar. When you consider how much that amount of money would buy in that age and country, and how usual it was to be scruffulous when not dead, you would understand that the annual King's Evil Appropriation was just the river and harbour bill of that government for the grip it took on the Treasury, and the chance it afforded for skinning the surplus. So I had privately concluded to touch the Treasury itself for the King's Evil. I covered six sevenths of the appropriation into the Treasury a week before starting from Camelot on my adventures, and ordered that the other sevenths be inflated into five cent nickels and delivered into the hands of the head clerk of the King's Evil Department—a nickel to take the place of each gold coin, you see, and do its work for it. It might strain the nickel some, but I judged it could stand it. As a rule I do not approve of watering stock, but I considered it square enough in this case, for it was just a gift, anyway. Of course you can water a gift as much as you want to, and I generally do. The old coin and silver coins of the country were of ancient and unknown origin as a rule, but some of them were Roman. They were ill-shapen, and seldom rounder than a moon that is a week past the full. They were hammered, not minted, and they were so worn with use that the devices upon them were as illegible as blisters, and looked like them. I judged that a sharp, bright new nickel with a first-rate likeness of the King on one side of it, and Guinevere on the other, and a blooming pious motto, would take the tuck out of scruffula as handy as a nobler coin, and please the scruffula's fancy more. And I was right. This batch was the first it was tried on, and it worked to a charm. The saving and expense was a notable economy. You will see that by these figures. We touched a trifle over seven hundred of the eight hundred patients. At former rates, this would have cost the government about two hundred and forty dollars. At the new rate, we pulled through for about thirty-five dollars, thus saving upwards of two hundred dollars at one swoop. To appreciate the full magnitude of this stroke, consider these other figures. The annual expenses of a national government amount to the equivalent of a contribution of three days' average wages of every individual of the population, counting every individual as if he were a man. If you take a nation of sixty million, where average wages are two dollars per day, three days' wages taken from each individual will provide three hundred and sixty million dollars, and pay the government's expenses. In my day, in my own country, this money was collected from imposts, and the citizen imagined that the foreign importer paid it, and it made him comfortable to think so, whereas in fact it was paid by the American people, and was so equally and exactly distributed among them that the annual cost to the one hundred millionaire and the annual cost to the sucking child of the day laborer was precisely the same. Each paid six dollars. Nothing could be equaler than that, I reckon. Well, Scotland and Ireland were tributary to Arthur, and the united populations of the British Islands amounted to something less than one million. A mechanic's average wage was three cents a day, when he paid his own keep. By this rule the national government's expenses were ninety thousand dollars a year, or about two hundred and fifty dollars a day. Thus, by the substitution of nickels for gold on a king's evil day, I not only injured no one, dissatisfied no one, but pleased all concerned, and saved four-fifths of that day's national expense into the bargain, a saving which would have been the equivalent of eight hundred thousand dollars in my day in America. In making this substitution I had drawn upon the wisdom of a very remote source, the wisdom of my boyhood. For the true statesman does not despise any wisdom, however lowly may be its origin, in my boyhood I had always saved my pennies and contributed buttons to the foreign missionary cause. The buttons would answer the ignorant savage as well as the coin. The coin would answer me better than the buttons. All hands were happy, and nobody hurt. Maranel took the patience as they came. He examined the candidate. If he couldn't qualify he was warmed off. If he could he was passed along to the king. A priest pronounced the words, They shall lay their hands on the sick, and they shall recover. Then the king stroked the ulcers, while the reading continued. Finally the patient graduated and got his nickel. The king hanging it around his neck himself, and was dismissed. Would you think that that would cure? It certainly did. Any mummery will cure if the patient's faith is strong in it. Up by Astalot there was a chapel, where the virgin had once appeared to a girl who used to herd geese around there. The girl said so herself, and they built the chapel upon that spot and hung a picture in it representing the occurrence. A picture which you would think it dangerous for a sick person to approach. Whereas, on the contrary, thousands of the lame and the sick came and prayed before it every year, and went away whole and sound. And even the well could look upon it and live. Of course when I was told these things I did not believe them. But when I went there and saw them, I had to succumb. I saw the cures affected myself, and they were real cures, and not questionable. I saw cripples whom I had seen around Camelot for years on crutches arrive, and pray before that picture, and put down their crutches, and walk off without a limp. There were piles of crutches there which had been left by such people as a testimony. In other places people operated on a patient's mind without saying a word to him, and cured him. In others experts assembled patients in a room and prayed over them, and appealed to their faith, and those patients went away cured. Wherever you find a king who can't cure the king's evil you can be sure that the most valuable superstition that supports his throne, the subject's belief in the divine appointment of his sovereign, has passed away. In my youth the monarchs of England had ceased to touch for the evil, but there was no occasion for this diffidence. They could have cured it 49 times in fifty. Well, when the priest had been droning for three hours and the good king polishing the evidences, and the sick were still pressing forward as plenty as ever, I got to feeling intolerably bored. I was sitting by an open window not far from the canopy of state. For the five hundredth time a patient stood forward to have his repulsiveness is stroked. Again those words were being droned out. They shall lay their hands on the sick, when outside there rang clear as a clarion, a note that enchanted my soul and tumbled thirteen worthless centuries about my ears. Camelot, weekly Hosanna and literary volcano, latest eruption, only two cents, all about the big miracle in the valley of holiness. One greater than kings had arrived, the news boy. But I was the only person in all that throng who knew the meaning of this mighty birth, and what this imperial magician was come into the world to do. I dropped a nickel out of the window and got my paper. The Adam news boy of the world went around the corner to get my change. It is around the corner yet. It was delicious to see a newspaper again, yet I was conscious of a secret shock when my eye fell upon the first batch of display headlines. I had lived in a clammy atmosphere of reverence, respect, deference, so long that they sent a quivery little cold wave through me. High times in the valley of holiness. The water works corked. Brear Merlin works his arts, but gets left. But the boss scores on his first innings. The miraculous well uncorked amid awful outbursts of infernal fire and smoke and thunder. The buzzard roost astonished. Unparalleled rejoined blings. And so on and so on. Yes, it was too loud. Once I could have enjoyed it and seen nothing out of the way about it, but now its note was discordant. It was good Arkansas journalism, but this was not Arkansas. Moreover, the next to the last line was calculated to give offence to the hermits, and perhaps lose us their advertising. Indeed, there was too lightsome a tone of flippancy all through the paper. It was plain I had undergone a considerable change without noticing it. I found myself unpleasantly affected by pert little irreverencies, which would have seemed but proper and airy graces of speech at an earlier period of my life. There was an abundance of the following breed of items, and they discomforted me. Sir Lancelot met up with old King Agrivence of Ireland unexpectedly last week, over only more south of Sir Balmoral, Le Merveille's Hoggs Dastur. The widow has been notified. Expedition No. 3 will start adote the first of next month on a search for Sir Sagromorla de Zyrus. It is in command of the renowned Knight of the Red Lawns assisted by Sir Persant of Inde, who is competed intelligent, courteous, and in every way a brick, and further assisted by Sir Palamades, the Sarmasen, who is no Huckleberry himself. This is no picnic. These boys mean business. The readers of the Hazana will regret to learn that the handsome and popular Sir Charley of Gaul, who during his four-week stay at the bull in Halibut, the city, has won every heart by his polished manners and elegant conversation will pull out today for home. Give us another call, Charlie. The bidden decidis, and of the funeral of the late Sir Dalyance, the Duke's son of Cornwall, killed in an encounter with the giant of the knotted bludgeon last Tuesday on the borders of the Plain of Enchantment, was in the hands of the ever affable and efficient mumble Prince of Undertakers, then whom there exists none by whom it were a more satisfying pleasure to have the last sad offices performed. Give him a trial. The cordial thanks of the Hazana office are due, from editor down to devil, to the ever courteous and thoughtful Lord Highstude of the palace's third assistant for several saucers of ice-cream, a quality calculated to make the E. I. of the recipients humid with gur-dude, and it done it. When this administration wants to chalk up a desirable name for early promotion, the Hazana would like a chance to suggest. The Demoiselle Irene Doolap of South Astelot is visiting her uncle, the popular host of the Catleman's boarding-hoats, Lever Lane, the city. Young Barker, the bellows-mender, is home again, and looks much improved by his vacation round up among the outlying Smithies. See his ad. Of course it was good enough journalism for a beginning, I knew that quite well, and yet it was somehow disappointing. The court circular, pleased me better, indeed its simple and dignified respectfulness was a distinct refreshment to me after all those disgraceful familiarities, but even it could have been improved. Do what one may, there is no getting an air of variety into a court circular, I acknowledge that. There is a profound monotonousness about its facts that baffles and defeats one's sincerest efforts to make them sparkle and enthuse. The best way to manage, in fact, the only sensible way, is to disguise repetitiousness a fact under variety of form. Skin your fact each time and lay on a new cuticle of words. It deceives the eye. You think it is a new fact. It gives you the idea that the court is carrying on like everything. This excites you, and you drain the whole column with a good appetite, and perhaps never notice that it's a barrel of soup made out of a single beam. Clarence's way was good. It was simple. It was dignified. It was direct and businesslike. All I say is it was not the best way. Court circular. On Monday the king rode in the park. On Tuesday the king rode in the park. On Wednesday the king rode in the park. On Thursday the king rode in the park. On Friday the king rode in the park. On Saturday the king rode in the park. On Sunday the king rode in the park. However, take the paper by enlarge. I was vastly pleased with it. Little crudities of a mechanical sort were observable here and there, but there were not enough of them to amount to anything, and it was good enough Arkansas proofreading anyhow, and better than was needed in Arthur's day and realm. As a rule the grammar was leaky and the construction more or less lame, but I did not much mind these things. They are common defects of my own, and one mustn't criticize other people on grounds where he can't stand perpendicular himself. I was hungry enough for literature to want to take down the whole paper at this one meal, but I got only a few bites, and then had to postpone because the monks around me beseeched me, so with eager questions. What is this curious thing? What is it for? Is it a handkerchief? Saddle blanket? Part of a shirt? What is it made of? How thin it is? And how dainty and frail and how it rattles? With it where do you think, and won't the rain injure it? Is it writing that appears on it, or is it only ornamentation? They suspected it was writing, because those among them who knew how to read Latin and had a smattering of Greek recognized some of the letters, but they could make nothing out of the result as a whole. I put my information in the simplest form I could. It is a public journal! I will explain what that is another time. It is not cloth, it is made of paper. Sometime I will explain what paper is. The lines on it are reading matter, and not written by hand, but printed. By and by I will explain what printing is. A thousand of these sheets have been made, all exactly like this, in every minute detail, they can't be told apart. Then they all broke out with exclamations of surprise and admiration. A thousand? Verily a mighty work, a year's work for many men! No, merely a day's work for a man and a boy. They crossed themselves and whiffed out a protective prayer or two. Ah! A miracle! A wonder! Dark work of enchantment! I let it go at that. Then I read in a low voice, to as many as could crowd their shaven heads within hearing distance, part of the account of the miracle of the restoration of the well, and was accompanied by astonished and reverent ejaculations all through. Ah! How true! Amazing, amazing! These be the very haps as they happened, in marvellous exactness! And might they take this strange thing in their hands and feel of it and examine it? They would be very careful. Yes, they took it, handling it as cautiously and devotedly, as if it had been some holy thing come from some supernatural region, and gently felt of its texture, caressed its pleasant smooth surface with lingering touch, and scanned the mysterious characters with fascinated eyes. These grouped bent heads, these charmed faces, these speaking eyes, how beautiful to me! For it was not this my darling, and was not all this mute wonder and interest and homage a most eloquent tribute an unforced compliment to it. I knew then how a mother feels when women, whether strangers or friends, take her new baby and close themselves about it with one eager impulse, and bend their heads over it in a tranced adoration that makes all the rest of the universe vanish out of their consciousness, and be as if it were not for that time. I knew how she feels, and that there is no other satisfied ambition whether of king, conqueror, or poet, that ever reaches halfway to that serene far summit, or yields half so divine a contentment. During all the rest of the séance my paper traveled from group to group all up and down and about that huge hall, and my happy eye was upon it always, and I sat motionless, steeped in satisfaction, drunk with enjoyment. Yes, this was heaven! I was tasting it once, if I might never taste it more. About bedtime I took the king to my private quarters to cut his hair, and help him get the hang of the lowly raiment he was to wear. The high classes wore their hair banged across the forehead, but hanging to the shoulders the rest of the way around, whereas the lowest ranks of commoners were banged for and aft both. The slaves were bangless and allowed their hair free growth. So I inverted a bowl over his head and cut away all the locks that hung below it. I also trimmed his whiskers and mustache until they were only about a half inch long. I tried to do it inartistically, and succeeded. It was a villainous disfigurement. When he got his rubberly sandals on and his long robe of coarse brown linen cloth which hung straight from his neck to his ankle bones, he was no longer the comliest man in his kingdom, but one of the unhandsomest and most commonplace and unattractive. We were dressed and barbered alike and could pass for small farmers or farm bailiffs or shepherds or carters—yes, or for village artisans, if we chose—our costume being in effect universal among the poor because of its strength and cheapness. I don't mean that it was really cheap to be a very poor person, but I do mean that it was the cheapest material there was for male attire—manufactured material, you understand. We slipped away an hour before dawn and by broad sun-up had made eight or ten miles and were in the midst of a sparsely settled country. I had a pretty heavy knapsack, it was laden with provisions, provisions for the king to taper down on till he could take to the coarse fare of the country without damage. I found a comfortable seat for the king by the roadside and then gave him a morsel or two to stay his stomach with. Then I said I would find some water for him and strolled away. Part of my project was to get out of sight and sit down and rest a little myself. It had always been my custom to stand when in his presence, even at the council-board except upon those rare occasions when the sitting was a very long one, extending over hours. Then I had a trifling little backless thing which was like a reversed culvert and was as comfortable as the toothache. I didn't want to break him in suddenly, but do it by degrees. We should have to sit together now when in company, or people would notice, but it would not be good politics for me to be playing equality with him when there was no necessity of it. I found the water some three hundred yards away and had been resting about twenty minutes when I heard voices. That is all right, I thought. Peasants going to work, nobody else likely to be stirring this early. But the next moment these comers jingled into sight around a turn of the road, smartly clad people of quality with luggage mules and servants in their train. I was off like a shot through the bushes by the shortest cut. For a while it did seem that these people would pass the king before I could get to him, but desperation gives you wings, you know, and I canted my body forward, inflated my breast and held my breath and flew. I arrived, and in plenty good enough time, too. Pardon my king, but it's no time for ceremony. Jump, jump to your feet, some quality are coming. Is that a marvel? Let them come! But, my liege, you must not be seen sitting, rise, and stand in humble posture while they pass. You are a peasant, you know. True, I had forgot it. So lost was I in planning of a huge war with Gaul. He was up by this time, but a farm could have got up quicker if there was any kind of a boom in real estate. And right, so a thought came, randoming overthwart this majestic dream, the which a humbler attitude, my lord the king, and quick, duck your head, more, still more, droop it. He did his honest best, but lord it was no great things. He looked as humble as the leaning tower of Pisa. It is the most you could say of it. Indeed it was such a thundering poor success that it raised wondering scowls all along the line, and a gorgeous flunky at the tail end of it raised his whip, but I jumped in time and was under it when it fell, and under cover of the volley of coarse laughter which followed I spoke up sharply and warned the king to take no notice. He mastered himself for the moment, but it was a sore tax. He wanted to eat up the procession. I said, it would end our adventures at the very start, and we, being without weapons, could do nothing with that armed gang. If we are going to succeed in our imprise, we must not only look the peasant, but act the peasant. It is wisdom. None can gain say it. Let's go on, sir boss. I will take note and learn, and do the best I may. He kept his word. He did the best he could, but I've seen better. If you have ever seen an active, heedless, enterprising child going diligently out of one mischief and into another all day long, and an anxious mother at his heels all the while, and just saving it by a hair from drowning itself or breaking its neck with each new experiment, you've seen the king and me. If I could have foreseen what the king was going to be like, I should have said no. If anybody wants to make his living exhibiting a king as a peasant, let him take the lay out. I can do better with a menagerie and last longer. And yet, during the first three days I never allowed him to enter a hut or other dwelling. If he could pass muster anywhere during his early novitiate, it would be in small ins and on the road. So to these places we confined ourselves. Yes, he certainly did the best he could, but what of that? He didn't improve a bit that I could see. He was always frightening me, always breaking out with fresh astonishers in new and unexpected places, toward evening on the second day. What does he do but blindly fetch out a dirk from inside his robe? Great guns, my liege! Where did you get that? From a smuggler at the inn, yester eve. What in the world possessed you to buy it? We have escaped divers dangers by wit, thy wit, but I have bethought me that it were but prudence if I bore a weapon too. Thine might fail thee in some pinch. But people of our condition are not allowed to carry arms. What would a lord say? Yes, or any other person of whatever condition if he caught an upstart peasant with a dagger on his person? It was a lucky thing for us that nobody came along just then. I persuaded him to throw the dirk away, and it was as easy as persuading a child to give up some bright fresh new way of killing itself. We walked along silent and thinking. Finally the king said, When ye know that I meditate a thing inconvenient or that hath apparel in it, why do ye not warn me to cease from that project? It was a startling question and a puzzler. I didn't quite know how to take hold of it, or what to say, and so, of course, I ended up by saying the natural thing. But, Sire, how can I know what your thoughts are? The king stopped dead in his tracks and stared at me. I believed thou art greater than Merlin, and truly in magic thou art, but prophecy is greater than magic. Merlin is a prophet. I saw I had made a blunder. I must get back my lost ground. After a deep reflection and careful planning, I said, Sire, I have been misunderstood. I will explain. There are two kinds of prophecy. One is the gift to foretell things that are but a little way off, the other is the gift to foretell things that are whole ages and centuries away. Which is the mightier gift, you think? Oh, the last most surely. True. Does Merlin possess it? Partly, yes. He foretold mysteries about my birth and future kingship that were twenty years away. Has he ever gone beyond that? He would not claim more, I think. It is probably his limit. All prophets have their limit. The limit of some of the great prophets has been a hundred years. These are few, I wean. There have been two still greater ones, whose limit was four hundred and six hundred years, and one whose limit compassed even seven hundred and twenty. Grammarcy! It is marvellous! But what are these in comparison with me? They are nothing. What? Can't thou truly look beyond even so vast a stretch of time as seven hundred years? My liege! As clear as the vision of an eagle does my prophetic eye penetrate and lay bare the future of this world for nearly thirteen centuries and a half. My land, you should have seen the king's eye spread slowly open and lift the earth's entire atmosphere as much as an inch. That settled prayer, Merlin. One never had any occasion to prove his facts with these people. All he had to do was to state them. It never occurred to anybody to doubt the statement. Now then, I continued, I could work both kinds of prophecy, the long and the short, if I chose to take the trouble to keep in practice, but I seldom exercise any but the long kind because the other is beneath my dignity. It is properer to Merlin's sort. Stump-tailed prophets, as we call them in the profession. Of course, I wet up now and then, and flirt out a minor prophecy, but not often. Hardly ever, in fact. You will remember that there was great talk when you reached the valley of holiness about my having prophesied your coming and the very hour of your arrival two or three days beforehand. Indeed, yes, I mined it now. Well, I could have done it as much as forty times easier and piled on a thousand times more detail into the bargain if it had been five hundred years away instead of two or three days. How amazing that it should be so! Yes, a genuine expert can always foretell a thing that is five hundred years away easier than he can, a thing that's only five hundred seconds off. And yet, in reason, it should clearly be the other way. It should be five hundred times as easy to foretell the last as the first, for indeed, it is so close by that one uninspired might almost see it. In truth, the law of prophecy, doth contradict the likelihoods, most strangely making the difficult, the easy, and the easy difficult. It was a wise head. A peasant's cap was no safe disguise for it. You could know it for a king's under a diving-belt, if you could hear it work its intellect. I had a new trade now, and plenty of business in it. The king was as hungry to find out everything that was going to happen during the next thirteen centuries as if he were expecting to live in them. From that time out I prophesied myself bald-headed trying to supply the demand. I have done some indiscreet things in my day, but this thing of playing myself for a prophet was the worst. Still it had its ameliorations. A prophet doesn't have to have any brains. They are good to have, of course, for the ordinary exigencies of life, but they are no use in professional work. It is the restfulest vocation there is. When the spirit of prophecy comes upon you, you merely cake your intellect and lay it off in a cool place for a rest, and unship your jaw and leave it alone. It will work itself. The result is prophecy. Every day a night errant or so came along, and the sight of them fired the king's martial spirit every time. He would have forgotten himself, sure, and said something to them in a style of suspicious shade or so above his ostensible degree, and so I always got him well out of the road in time. Then he would stand and look with all his eyes, and a proud light would flash from them, and his nostrils would inflate like a war-horse's, and I knew he was longing for a brush with them. But about noon of the third day I had stopped in the road to take a precaution which had been suggested by the whip-stroke that had fallen to my share two days before—a caution which I had afterward decided to leave untaken, I was so loath to institute it—but now I had just had a fresher reminder. While striding heedlessly along with jaw spread and intellect at rest, for I was prophesying, I stubbed my toe and fell sprawling. I was so pale I couldn't think for a moment. Then I got softly and carefully up and unstrapped my knapsack. I had that dynamite bomb in it, done up in wool in a box. It was a good thing to have along. The time would come when I could do a valuable miracle with it, maybe, but it was a nervous thing to have about me and I didn't like to ask the king to carry it. Yet I must either throw it away or think up some safe way to get along with its society. I got it out and slipped it into my script, and just then here came a couple of nights. The king stood, stately as a statue, gazing toward them, had forgotten himself again, of course, and before I could get a word of warning out it was time for him to skip, and well that he did it too. He supposed they would turn aside, turn aside to avoid trampling peasant dirt underfoot, when had he ever turned aside himself or ever had the chance to do it, if a peasant saw him or any other noble knight in time to judiciously save him the trouble. The knight paid no attention to the king at all. It was his place to look out himself, and if he hadn't skipped he would have been placidly written down and laughed at besides. The king was in a flaming fury and launched out his challenge and epithets with a most royal vigor. The knights were some little distance by now. They halted, greatly surprised, and turned in their saddles and looked back, as if wondering if it might be worthwhile to bother with such scum as we. Then they wheeled and started for us. Not a moment must be lost. I started for them. I passed them at a rattling gate, and as I went by I flung out a hair-lifting, soul-scorching, thirteen-jointed insult which made the king's effort poor and cheap by comparison. I got it out of the nineteenth century where they know how. They had such headway that they were nearly to the king before they could check up. Then, frantic with rage, they stood up their horses on their hind hooves and whirled them around. At the next moment here they came, breast to breast. I was seventy yards off, then, and scrambling up a great boulder at the roadside. When they were within thirty yards of me they let their long lances droop to a level, depressed their mailed heads, and so, with their horse-hair plumes streaming straight out behind, most gallant to see this lightning express came tearing for me. When they were within fifteen yards I sent that bomb with a sure aim, and it struck the ground just under the horses' noses. Yes, it was a neat thing, very neat and pretty to see. It resembled a steamboat explosion on the Mississippi, and during the next fifteen minutes we stood under a steady drizzle of microscopic fragments of knights and hardware and horse-flesh. I say we, for the king, joined the audience, of course, as soon as he had got his breath again. There was a hole there which would afford steady work for all the people in that region for some years to come, in trying to explain it, I mean. As for filling it up, that service would be comparatively prompt, and would fall to the lot of a select few peasants of that scenery, and they wouldn't get anything for it, either. But I explained it to the king myself. I said it was done with a dynamite bomb. This information did him no damage because it left him as intelligent as he was before. However, it was a noble miracle in his eyes, and was another settler for Merlin. I thought it well enough to explain that this was a miracle of so rare a sort that it couldn't be done except when the atmospheric conditions were just right. Otherwise he would be on-coring at every time we had a good subject, and that would be inconvenient, because I hadn't any more bombs along. CHAPTER XXVIII On the morning of the fourth day, when it was just sunrise, we had been tramping an hour in the chill dawn. I came to a resolution. The king must be drilled. Things could not go on so. He must be taken in hand, and deliberately and conscientiously drilled. Or we couldn't ever venture to enter a dwelling. The very cats would know this masquerader for a humbug and no peasant. So I called a halt and said, Sire, as between clothes and countenance, you are all right. There is no discrepancy. But as between your clothes and your bearing, you are all wrong. There is a most noticeable discrepancy. Your soldierly stride, your lordly port, these will not do. You stand too straight. Your looks are too high, too confident. The cares of a kingdom do not stoop the shoulders. They do not droop the chin. They do not depress the high level of the eye-glance. They do not put doubt and fear in the heart and hang out the signs of them in slouching body and unsure step. It is the sordid cares of the lowly born that do these things. You must learn the trick. You must imitate the trademarks of poverty, misery, oppression, insult, and the other several and common inhumanities that sap the manliness out of a man and make him a loyal and proper and approved subject and a satisfaction to his masters. Or the very infants will know you for better than your disguise, and we shall go to pieces at the first hut we stop at. Pray try to walk like this. The king took careful note and then tried an imitation. Pretty fair, pretty fair, but chin a little lower, please. There, very good. Eyes too high. Pray don't look at the horizon. Look at the ground. Ten steps in front of you. Ah, that is better. That is very good. Wait, please. You betray too much vigor. Too much decision. You want more of a shamble. Look at me, please. This is what I mean. Now you are getting it. That is the idea. At least it sort of approaches it. Yes, that is pretty fair. But there is a great big something wanting. I don't quite know what it is. Please walk thirty yards so I can get a perspective on the thing. Now then, your head's right, speed's right, shoulders right, eyes right, chin right, gait, carriage, general style right, everything's right. And yet the fact remains the aggregate's wrong. The account don't balance. Do it again, please. Now I think I begin to see what it is. Yes, I've struck it. You see, the genuine spiritlessness is wanting. That's what's the trouble. It's all amateur, mechanical details all right, almost to a hair. Everything's about the delusion perfect except that it don't delude. What then must one do to prevail? Let me think. I can't seem to quite get at it. In fact, there isn't anything that can write the matter but practice. This is a good place for it. Roots and stony ground to break up your stately gait. A region not liable to interruption. Only one field and one hut in sight. And they so far away that nobody could see us from there. It will be well to move a little off the road and put in the whole day drilling you, sire. After the drill had gone on a little while I said, Now, sire, imagine that we are at the door of the hut yonder and the family are before us. Proceed, please, accost the head of the house. The king unconsciously straightened up like a monument and said with frozen austerity, Violet, bring a seat and serve to me what cheer you have. Ah, your grace, that is not well done. In what lacketh it? These people do not call each other violets. Nay, is that true? Yes. Only those above them call them so. Then must I try again. I will call him villain. No, no, for he may be a free man. So then, per adventure, I should call him Goodman. That would answer, your grace, but it would be still better if you said friend or brother. Brother? To dirt like that? Ah, but we are pretending to be dirt like that, too. It is even true, I will say it. Brother, bring a seat and there to what cheer you have with all. Now it is right. Not quite, not wholly right. You have asked for one, not us. For one, not both. Food for one. A seat for one. The king looked puzzled. He wasn't a very heavyweight intellectually. His head was an hourglass. It could stow an idea, but it had to do it at grain at a time, not the whole idea at once. Would you have a seat also and sit? If I did not sit, the man would perceive that we were only pretending to be equals and playing the deception pretty poorly, too. It is well and truly said. How wonderful is truth! Come it in whatsoever unexpected form it may. Yes, he must bring out seats and food for both, and in serving us present not youer and napkin with more show of respect to the one than to the other. And there is even yet a detail that needs correcting. He must bring nothing outside. We will go in, in among the dirt, and possibly other repulsive things, and take the food with the household, and after the fashion of the house, and all on equal terms, except the man be of the surf-class. And finally there will be no youer and no napkin, whether he be surf or free. Please walk again, my liege. There it is better, it is the best yet, but not perfect. The shoulders have known no ignobler burden than iron mail, and they will not stoop. Give me then the bag. I will learn the spirit that goeth with burdens that have not honour. It is the spirit that stoopeth the shoulders, I wean, and not the weight. For armor is heavy, yet it is a proud burden, and a man standeth straight in it. Nay, but me no buts. Offer me no objections. I will have the thing. Strap it upon my back. He was complete now with that knapsack on, and looked as little like a king as any man I had ever seen. But it was an obstinate pair of shoulders. They could not seem to learn the trick of stooping with any sort of deceptive naturalness. The drill went on, I prompting and correcting. Now make believe you are in debt, and eaten up by relentless creditors. You are out of work, which is horseshoeing, let us say, and can get none, and your wife is sick, your children are crying because they are hungry, and so on and so on. I drilled him as representing in turn all sorts of people out of luck, and suffering dire privations and misfortunes. But, Lord, it was only just words, words. They meant nothing in the world to him. I might just as well have whistled. Words realize nothing, vivify nothing to you, unless you have suffered in your own person a thing which the words try to describe. There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and complacently about the working classes, and satisfy themselves that a day's hard intellectual work is very much harder than a day's hard manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much bigger pay. Why, they really think that, you know, because they know all about the one, but haven't tried the other. But I know all about both, and so far, as I am concerned, there isn't money enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pickaxe thirty days. But I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as near nothing as you can cipher it down, and I will be satisfied too. Intellectual work is misnamed. It is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven when he is at work, and as for the musician with the fiddle-bow in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him. Why, certainly he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but Lord, it's a sarcasm just the same. The law of work does seem utterly unfair, but there it is, and nothing can change it. The higher the pay and enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay and cash also, and it's also the very law of those transparent swindles, transmissible nobility, and kingship.