Feudal Europe occupies a place in Mark Twain’s imagination second only to the river towns of his boyhood, so it should come as no surprise that he followedHuckleberryFinn (1884) with a book set in Camelot.

Charmed by Sir Thomas Malory’sMorte Darthur, Mark Twain originally planned a genial burlesque of the knights of the Round Table. His first notes forA Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Courtshow the fun he planned to get out of his idea: “Dream of being a knight errant in armor in the middle ages.... No pockets in the armor. No way to...

It was in Warwick Castle that I came across the curious stranger whom I am going to talk about. He attracted me by three things: his candid simplicity, his marvelous familiarity with ancient armor, and the restfulness of his company—for he did all the talking. We fell together, as modest people will, in the tail of the herd that was being shown through, and he at once began to say things which inter ested me. As he talked along, softly, pleasantly, flowingly, he seemed to drift away imperceptibly out of this world and time, and into some remote era...

Camelot—Camelot,” said I to myself. “I don’t seem to remember hearing of it before. Name of the asylum, likely.”

It was a soft, reposeful, summer landscape, as lovely as a dream, and as lonesome as Sunday. The air was full of the smell of flowers, and the buzzing of insects, and tbe twittering of birds; and there were no people, no wagons, there was no stir or life, nothing going on. The road was mainly a winding path with hoof-prints in it, and now and then a faint trace of wheels on either side in the grass—wheels that...

The moment I got a chance I slipped aside privately and touched an ancient common-looking man on the shoulder and said, in an insinuating, confidential way—

“Friend, do me a kindness. Do you belong to the asylum, or are you just here on a visit, or something like that?”

He looked me over, stupidly, and said—

“Marry, fair sir, meseemeth—”

“That will do,” I said; “I reckon you are a patient.”

I moved away, cogitating, and at the same time keeping an eye out for any chance passenger in his right mind that might come along and give me...

Mainly, the Round Table talk was monologues—narrative accounts of the adventures in which these prisoners were captured and their friends and backers killed and stripped of their steeds and armor. As a general thing—as far as I could make out—these murderous adventures were not forays undertaken to avenge injuries, nor to settle old disputes or sudden fallings out; no, as a rule they were simply duels between strangers—duels between people who had never even been introduced to each other, and between whom existed no cause of offence whatever. Many a time I had seen a couple...

It seemed to me that this quaint lie was most simply and beautifully told; but then I had heard it only once, and that makes a difference; it was pleasant to the others when it was fresh, no doubt.

Sir Dinadan the Humorist was the first to awake, and be soon roused the rest with a practical joke of a sufficiently poor quality. He tied some metal mugs to a dog’s tail and turned him loose, and he tore round and around the place in a frenzy of fright, with all the other dogs bellowing after him and battering and...

I was so tired that even my fears were not able to keep me awake long.

When I next came to myself, I seemed to have been asleep a very long rime My first thouht was, “Well, what an astonishing dream I’ve had! I reckon I’ve waked only just in time to keep from being hanged or drowned or burned, or something. . . . I’ll nap again till the whistle blows, and then I’ll go down to the arms-factory and have it out with Hercules.”

But just then I heard the harsh music of rusty chains and bolts, a...

In the stillness and the darkness, realization soon began to supplement knowledge. The mere knowledge of a fact is pale; but when you come torealizeyour fact, it takes on color. It is all the difference between hearing of a man being stabbed to the heart, and seeing it done. In the stillness and the darkness, the knowledge that I was in deadly danger took to itself deeper and deeper meaning all the time; a something which was realization crept inch by inch through my veins and turned me cold.

But it is a blessed provision of nature that...

Inasmuch as I was now the second personage in the kingdom, as far as political power and authority were concerned, much was made of me. My raiment was of silks and velvets and cloth of gold, and by consequence was very showy, also uncomfortable. But habit would soon reconcile me to my clothes; I was aware of that. I was given the choicest suite of apartments in the castle, after the king’s. They were aglow with loud-colored silken hangings, but the Stone floors had nothing but rushes on them for a carpet, and they were misfit rushes at that, being...

To be vested with enormous authority is a fine thing; but to have the on-looking world consent to it is a finer. The tower-episode solidified my power, and made it impregnable. If any were perchance disposed be jealous and critical before that, they experienced a change of heart, now. There was not any one in the kingdom who would have considered it good judgment to meddle with my matters.

I was fast getting adjusted to my situation and circumstances. For a time, I used to wake up, mornings, and smile at my “dream,” and listen for the Colt’s factory-whistle; but...

They were always having grand tournaments there at Camelot; and very stirring, and picturesque and ridiculous human bull-fights they were, too, but just a little wearisome to the practical mind. However, I was generally on hand—for two reasons: a man must not hold himself aloof from the things which his friends and his community have at heart if he would be liked—especially a statesman; and both as business man and statesman I wanted to study the tournament and see if I couldn’t invent an improvement on it. That reminds me to remark, in passing, that the very first...

The Round Table soon heard of the challenge, and of course it was a good deal discussed, for such things interested the boys. The king thought I ought now to set forth in quest of adventures, so that I might gain renown and be the more worthy to meet Sir Sagramour when the several years should have rolled away. I excused myself for the present; I said it would take me three or four years, yet, to get things well fixed up and going smoothly; then I should be ready; all the chances were that at the end of that...

There never was such a country for wandering liars; and they were of both sexes. Hardly a month went by without one of these tramps arriving; and generally loaded with a tale about some princess or other wanting help to get her out of some far-away castle where she was held in captivity by a law-less scoundrel, usually a giant. Now you would think that the first thing the king would do after listening to such a novelette from an entire stranger, would be to ask for credentials—yes, and a pointer or two as to locality of castle, best...

Straight off, we were in the country. It was most lovely and pleasant in those sylvan solitudes in the early cool morning in the first freshness of autumn. From hill-tops we saw fair green valleys lying spread out below, with streams winding through them, and island-groves of trees here and there, and huge lonely oaks scattered about and casting black blots of shade; and beyond the valleys we saw the ranges of hills, blue with haze, stretching away in billowy perspective to the horizon, with at wide intervals a dim fleck of white or gray on a wave-summit, which we...

Yes, it is strange how little a while at a time a person can be contented. Only a little while back, when I was riding and suffering, what a heaven this peace, this rest, this sweet serenity in this secluded shady nook, by this purling stream, would have seemed, where I could keep perfectly comfortable all the time by pouring a dipper of water into my armor now and then; yet already I was getting dissatisfied; partly because I could not light my pipe,—for although I had long ago started a match factory, I had forgotten to bring matches...

I paid three pennies for my breakfast, and most extravagant price it was, too, seeing that one could have breakfasted a dozen persons for that money; but I was feeling good, by this time, and I had always been a kind of spendthrift anyway; and then these people had wanted to give me the food for nothing, scant as their provision was, and so it was a grateful pleasure to emphasize my appreciation and sincere thankfulness with a good big financial lift where the money would do so much more good than it would in my helmet, where, these pennies...

And so I’m proprietor of some knights,” said I, as we rode off. “Who would ever have supposed that I should live to list-up assets of sort. I shan’t know what to do with them; unless I raffle them off. How many of them are there, Sandy?”

“Seven, please you sir, and their squires.”

“It is a good haul. Who are they? Where do they hang Out?”

“Where hang they out?”

“Yes; where do they live?” “Ah, I understood thee not. That will I tell thee eftsoons.” Then she said musingly, and softly, turning the words daintily over her tongue:...

If knights errant were to be believed, not all castles were desirable places to seek hospitality in. As a matter of fact, knights errant were not persons to be believed—that is, measured by modern standards of veracity, yet, measured by the standards of their own time, and scaled accordingly. you got the truth. It was very simple: you discounted a statement ninety-seven per cent; the rest was fact. Now after making this allowance, the truth remained that if I could find out something about a castle before ringing the door-bell—I mean, hailing the warders—it was the sensible...

Madame, seeing me pacific and unresentful, no doubt judged that I was deceived by her excuse; for her fright dissolved away, and she was soon so importunate to have me give an exhibition and kill somebody, that the thing grew to be embarrassing. However, to my relief she was presently interrupted by the call to prayers. I will say this much for the nobility: that, tyrannical, murderous, rapacious, and morally rotten as they were, they were deeply and enthusiastically religious. Nothing could divert them from the regular and faithful performance of the pieties enjoined by the Church. More than once...

Well, I arranged all that; and I had the man sent to his home. I had a great desire to rack the executioner; not because he was a good, pains-taking and pain-giving official,—for surely it was not to his discredit that he performed his functions well—but to pay him back for wantonly cuffing and otherwise distressing that young woman. The priests told me about this, and were generously hot to have him punished. Something of this disagreeable sort was turning up, every now and then: I mean, episodes that showed that not all priests were frauds and self-seekers,...

Sandy and I were on the road again, next morning, bright and early. It was so good to open up one’s lungs and take in whole luscious barrels-full of the blessed God’s untainted, dew-freshened, woodlandscented air once more, after suffocating body and mind for two days and nights in the moral and physical stenches of that intolerable old buzzard-roost! I mean, for me: of course the place was all right and agreeable enough for Sandy, for she had been used to high life all her days.

Poor girl, her jaws had had a wearisome rest, now, for a while; and...

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

Right-so came by and by a knight riding; and as he drew near he made dolorous moan, and by the words of it I perceived that he was cursing and swearing; yet nevertheless was I glad of his coming, for that I saw he bare a bulletin-board whereon in letters all of shining gold was writ—“Use Peterson’s Prophylactic Tooth-Brush—All The Go.” I was glad...

When I did get to bed at last I was un speakably tired; the stretching out, and the relaxing of the long-tense muscles, how luxurious, how delicious! but that was as far as I could get—sleep was out of the question, for the present. The ripping and tearing and squealing of the nobility up and down the halls and corridors was pandemonium come again, and kept me broad awake. Being awake, my thoughts were busy, of course; and mainly they busied themselves with Sandy's curious delusion. Here she was, as sane a person as the kingdom could produce; and...

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

Saturday noon I went to the well and looked on a while. Merlin was still burning smoke-powders, and pawing the air, and muttering gibberish as hard as ever, but looking pretty down-hearted, for of course he had not started even a perspiration in that well yet. finally I said:

“How does the thing promise by this time, partner?”

“Behold, I am even now busied with trial of the powerfulest enchantment known to the princes of the occult arts in the lands of the East; an it fail me, naught can avail. Peace, until I finish.”

He raised a smoke this...

My influence in the Valley of Holiness was something prodigious, now. It seemed worth· while to try to turn it to some valuable account. The thought came to me the next morning. and was suggested by my seeing one of my knights who was in the soap line come riding in. According to history, the monks of this place two centuries before, had been worldly minded enough to want to wash. It might be that there was a leaven of this unrighteousness still remaining. So I sounded a Brother:

“Wouldn’t you like a bath?”

He shuddered at the thought—the...

When the king traveled, for change of air, or made a progress, or visited a distant noble whom he wished to bankrupt with the cost of his keep, part of the administration moved with him. It was a fashion of the time. The Commission charged with the examination of candidates for posts in the army came with the king to the valley, where as 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...

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...

About bedtime I took the king to my private quarters to cut his hair and help him get the hang of the lowly raiment he was to wear. The high classes wore their hair banged across the forehead but hanging to the shoulders the rest of the way around, whereas the lowest ranks of commoners were banged fore and aft both; the slaves were bangless and allowed their hair free growth. So I inverted a bowl over his head and cut away all the locks that hung below it. I also trimmed his whiskers and moustache until they were only...

On the morning of the fourth day, when it was just sunrise, and we had been tramping an hour in the chill dawn, I came to a resolution: the kingmustbe 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...

When we arrived at that hut at mid-afternoon, we saw no signs of life about it. The field nearby had been denuded of its crop some time before, and had a skinned look, so exhaustively had it been harvested and gleaned. Fences, sheds, everything had a ruined look, and were eloquent of poverty. No animal was around anywhere, no living thing in sight. The stillness was awful, it was like the stillness of death. The cabin was a one-story one, whose thatch was black with age, and ragged from lack of repair.

The door stood a trifle ajar. We approached...

At midnight all was over, and we sat in the presence of four corpses. We covered them with such rags as we could find, and started away, fastening the door behind us. Their home must be these people’s grave, for they could not have Christian burial, or be admitted to consecrated ground. They were as dogs, wild beasts, lepers, and no soul that valued its hope of eternal life would throw it away by meddling in any sort with these rebuked and smitten outcasts.

We had not moved four steps when 1 caught a sound as of footsteps upon gravel....

We strolled along in a sufficiently indolent fashion, now, and talked. We must dispose of about the amount of time it ought to take to go to the little hamlet of Abblasoure and put justice on the track of those murderers and get back home again. And meantime I had an auxiliary interest which had never paled yet, never lost its novelty for me, since I had been in Arthur’s king dom: the behavior—born of nice and exact subdivisions of caste—of chance passers-by toward each other. Toward the shaven monk who trudged along with his cowl tilted back...

Well, when that cargo arrived, toward sunset, Saturday afternoon, I had my hands full to keep the Marcos from fainting. They were sure Jones and I were ruined past help, and they blamed them selves as accessories to this bankruptcy. You see, in addition to the dinner-materials, which called for a sufficiently round sum, I had bought a lot of extras for the future comfort of the family: for instance, a big lot of wheat, a delicacy as rare to the tables of their class as was ice cream to a hermit’s; also a sizeable deal dinner-table; also two entire...

However, I made a dead set at him, and before the first third of the dinner was reached, I had him happy again. It was easy to do—in a country of ranks and castes. You sec, in a country where they have ranks and castes, a man isn’t ever a man, he is only part of a man; he can’t ever get his full growth. You prove your superiority over him in station, or rank, or fortune, and that’s the end of it —he knuckles down. You can’t insult him after that. No, I don’t mean quite that; of...

Well, what had I better do? Nothing in a hurry, sure. I must get up a diversion; anything to employ me while I could think, and while these poor fellows could have a chance to come to life again. There sat Marco, petrified in the act of trying to get the hang of his miller-guo—turned to stone, just in the attitude he was in when my pile-driver fell, the toy still gripped in his unconscious fingers. So I took it from him and proposed to explain its mystery. Mystery! a simple little thing like that; and yet it was...

It’s a world of surprises. The king brooded; this was natural. What would he brood about, should you say? Why, about the prodigious nature of his fall, of course—from the loftiest place in the world to the lowest; from the most illustrious station in the world to the obscurest; from the grandest vocation among men to the basest. No, I take my oath that the thing that graveled him most, to start with, was not this, but the price he had fetched! He couldn’t seem to get over that seven dollars. Well, it stunned me so, when I first...

London—to a slave—was a sufficiently uninteresting place. It was merely a great big village; and mainly mud and thatch. The streets were muddy, crooked, unpaved. The populace was an ever flocking and drifting swarm of rags, and splendors, of nodding plumes and shining armor. The king had a palace there; he saw the outside of it. It made him sigh; yes, and swear a little, in a poor juvenile sixth-century way. We saw knights and grandees whom we knew, but they didn’t know us in our rags and dirt and raw welts and bruises, and wouldn’t have recognized...

Sleep? It was impossible. It would naturally have been impossible in that noisome cavern of a jail, with its mangy crowd of drunken, quarrelsome and song-singing rapscallions. But the thing that made sleep all the more a thing not to be dreamed of, was my racking impatience to get out of this place and find out the whole size of what might have happened yonder in the slave quarters in consequence of that intolerable miscarriage of mine.

It was a long night, but the morning got around at last. I made a full and frank explanation to the court. I...

Hearing four in the afternoon. The scene was just outside the walls of London. A cool, comfortable, superb day, with a brilliant sun; the kind of day to make one want to live, not die. The multitude was prodigious and far reaching; and yet we sixteen poor devils hadn’t a friend in it. There was something painful in that thought, look at it how you might. There we sat, on our tall scaffold, the butt of the hate and mockery of all those enemies. We were being made a holiday spectacle. They had built a sort of grand stand for...

Home again, at Camelot. A morning or two later I found the paper, damp from the press, by my plate at the breakfast table. I turned to the advertising columns, knowing I should find something of personal interest to me there. It was this:

ʞnow that the great lord and illustrious kni8ht. SIR SAGRAMOUR LE DESIOUS having condescended to meet the king’s Minister, Hank Morgan, the which is surnamed The Boss, for satisfaction of offenceanciently given, these wilL engage in the lists by Camelot about the fourtL hours on the morning or the sixteenth day of this next succeeding month....

When I broke the back of knight-errantry, that time, I no longer felt obliged to work in secret. So, the very next day I exposed my hidden schools, my mines, and my vast system of clandestine factories and work-shops to an astonished world. That is to say, I exposed the nineteenth century to the inspection of the sixth.

Well, it is always a good plan to follow up an advantage promptly. The knights were temporarily down, but if I would keep them so, I must just simply paralyze them—nothing short of that would answer. You sec, I was “bluffing,”...

However, my attention was suddenly snatched from such matters; our child began to lose ground again, and we had to go to sitting up with her, her case became so serious. We couldn’t bear to allow anybody to help, in this service, so we two stood watch and-watch, day in and day out. Ah, Sandy, what a right heart she had, how simple, and genuine, and good she was! She was a flawless wife and mother; and yet I had married her for no particular reason, except that by the customs of chivalry she was my property until some knight...

I found Clarence, alone in his quarters, drowned in melancholy; and in place of the electric light, he had re-instituted the ancient rag lamp, and sat there in a grisly twilight with all curtains drawn tight. He sprang up and rushed for me eagerly, saying:

“Oh, its worth a billion milrays to look upon a live person again!”

He knew me as casily as if I hadn’t been disguised at all. Which frightened me; one may easily believe that.

“Quick, now, tell me the meaning of this fearful disaster,” I said. “How did it come about!”

“Well, if there hadn’t...

In Merlin’s Cave—Clarence and I, and fifty-two fresh, bright, well educated, clean-minded young British boys. At dawn I sent an order to the factories, and to all our great works, to stop operations and remove all life to a safe distance, as everything was going to be blown up, by secret mines, “and no telling at what moment—therefore, vacate at once,” Those people knew me, and had confidence in my word. They would clear out without waiting to part their hair, and I could take my own time about dating the explosion. You couldn’t hire one of them...

I Clarence, must write it for him. He proposed that we two go out and see if any help could be afforded the wounded. I was strenuous against the project. I said that if there were many, we could do but little for them; and it would not be wise for us to trust ourselves among them, anyway. But he could seldom be turned from a purpose once formed; so we shut off the electric current from the fences, took an escort along. climbed over the enclosing ramparts of dead knights, and moved out upon the field. The first wounded...