A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

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 interested 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 and old forgotten country; and so he gradually wove such a spell about me that I seemed to move among the specters and shadows and dust and mold of a gray antiquity, holding speech with a relic of it! Exactly as I would speak of my nearest personal friends or enemies, or my most familiar neighbors, he spoke of Sir Bedivere, Sir Bors de Ganis, Sir Launcelot of the Lake, Sir Galahad, and all the other great names of the Table Round⁠—and how old, old, unspeakably old and faded and dry and musty and ancient he came to look as he went on! Presently he turned to me and said, just as one might speak of the weather, or any other common matter⁠—

“You know about transmigration of souls; do you know about transposition of epochs⁠—and bodies?”

He arrived, looked me over with a smiling and impudent curiosity; said he had come for me, and informed me that he was a page.

“Go ’long,” I said; “you ain’t more than a paragraph.”

It was pretty severe, but I was nettled. However, it never fazed him; he didn’t appear to know he was hurt. He began to talk and laugh, in happy, thoughtless, boyish fashion, as we walked along, and made himself old friends with me at once; asked me all sorts of questions about myself and about my clothes, but never waited for an answer⁠—always chattered straight ahead, as if he didn’t know he had asked a question and wasn’t expecting any reply, until at last he happened to mention that he was born in the beginning of the year 513.

It made the cold chills creep over me! I stopped and said, a little faintly:

“Maybe I didn’t hear you just right. Say it again⁠—and say it slow. What year was it?”

“513.”

“513! You don’t look it! Come, my boy, I am a stranger and friendless; be honest and honorable with me. Are you in your right mind?”

He said he was.

“Are these other people in their right minds?”

He said they were.

“And this isn’t an asylum? I mean, it isn’t a place where they cure crazy people?”

He said it wasn’t.

“Well, then,” I said, “either I am a lunatic, or something just as awful has happened. Now tell me, honest and true, where am I?”

“In King Arthur’s Court.”

I waited a minute, to let that idea shudder its way home, and then said:

“How long have I been shut up in this hole?”

“Ye were shut up when yesterday was well spent. It is nine of the morning now.”

“No! Then I have slept well, sure enough. Nine in the morning now! And yet it is the very complexion of midnight, to a shade. This is the 20th, then?”

“The 20th⁠—yes.”

“And I am to be burned alive tomorrow.” The boy shuddered.

“At what hour?”

“At high noon.”

“Now then, I will tell you what to say.” I paused, and stood over that cowering lad a whole minute in awful silence; then, in a voice deep, measured, charged with doom, I began, and rose by dramatically graded stages to my colossal climax, which I delivered in as sublime and noble a way as ever I did such a thing in my life: “Go back and tell the king that at that hour I will smother the whole world in the dead blackness of midnight; I will blot out the sun, and he shall never shine again; the fruits of the Earth shall rot for lack of light and warmth, and the peoples of the Earth shall famish and die, to the last man!”

I had to carry the boy out myself, he sunk into such a collapse. I handed him over to the soldiers, and went back.

She could have passed for old Uriens’ granddaughter, she could have been mistaken for sister to her own son.

As soon as we were fairly within the castle gates we were ordered into her presence. King Uriens was there, a kind-faced old man with a subdued look; and also the son, Sir Uwaine le Blanchemains, in whom I was, of course, interested on account of the tradition that he had once done battle with thirty knights, and also on account of his trip with Sir Gawaine and Sir Marhaus, which Sandy had been aging me with. But Morgan was the main attraction, the conspicuous personality here; she was head chief of this household, that was plain. She caused us to be seated, and then she began, with all manner of pretty graces and graciousnesses, to ask me questions. Dear me, it was like a bird or a flute, or something, talking. I felt persuaded that this woman must have been misrepresented, lied about. She trilled along, and trilled along, and presently a handsome young page, clothed like the rainbow, and as easy and undulatory of movement as a wave, came with something on a golden salver, and, kneeling to present it to her, overdid his graces and lost his balance, and so fell lightly against her knee. She slipped a dirk into him in as matter-of-course a way as another person would have harpooned a rat!

Two days later, toward noon, Sandy began to show signs of excitement and feverish expectancy. She said we were approaching the ogre’s castle. I was surprised into an uncomfortable shock. The object of our quest had gradually dropped out of my mind; this sudden resurrection of it made it seem quite a real and startling thing for a moment, and roused up in me a smart interest. Sandy’s excitement increased every moment; and so did mine, for that sort of thing is catching. My heart got to thumping. You can’t reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns. Presently, when Sandy slid from the horse, motioned me to stop, and went creeping stealthily, with her head bent nearly to her knees, toward a row of bushes that bordered a declivity, the thumpings grew stronger and quicker. And they kept it up while she was gaining her ambush and getting her glimpse over the declivity; and also while I was creeping to her side on my knees. Her eyes were burning now, as she pointed with her finger, and said in a panting whisper:

“The castle! The castle! Lo, where it looms!”

What a welcome disappointment I experienced! I said:

“Castle? It is nothing but a pigsty; a pigsty with a wattled fence around it.”

She looked surprised and distressed. The animation faded out of her face; and during many moments she was lost in thought and silent. Then: