A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court quotes

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, …

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

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

By the time I had recovered from the electric surprise of this remark, he was gone.

“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 the twittering of birds, and there were no people, no wagons, there was no stir of life, nothing going on.

By his look, he was good-natured; by his gait, he was satisfied with himself. He was pretty enough to frame. 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;

… clear out of my mind till its appointed day and hour should come, in order that I might turn all my attention to the circumstances of the present moment, and be alert and ready to make the most out of them that could be made.

One thing at a time, is my motto⁠—and just play that thing for all it is worth, even if it’s only two pair and a jack.

I made up my mind to two things: if it was still the nineteenth century and I was among lunatics and couldn’t get away, I would presently boss that asylum or know the reason why;

As a rule, the speech and behavior of these people were gracious and courtly; and I noticed that they were good and serious listeners when anybody was telling anything—I mean in a dogfightless interval.

And plainly, too, they were a childlike and innocent lot; telling lies of the stateliest pattern with a most gentle and winning naivety, and ready and willing to listen to anybody else’s lie, and believe it, too.

It was hard to associate them with anything cruel or dreadful; and yet they dealt in tales of blood and suffering with a guileless relish that made me almost forget to shudder.

but here were these big boobies sticking to it and taking pride in it clear up into full age and beyond. Yet there was something very engaging about these great simple-hearted creatures, something attractive and lovable.

There did not seem to be brains enough in the entire nursery, so to speak, to bait a fishhook with; but you didn’t seem to mind that, after a little, because you soon saw that brains were not needed in a society like that, and indeed would have marred it, hindered it, spoiled its symmetry⁠—perhaps rendered its existence impossible.

There was a fine manliness observable in almost every face; and in some a certain loftiness and sweetness that rebuked your belittling criticisms and stilled them.

But that neat idea hit the boy in a blank place, for geology hadn’t been invented yet. However, I made a note of the remark, and calculated to educate the commonwealth up to it if I pulled through.

It is no use to throw a good thing away merely because the market isn’t ripe yet.

Now Sir Kay arose and began to fire up on his history-mill with me for fuel. It was time for me to feel serious, and I did.

It seemed peculiarly sad to sit here, thirteen hundred years before I was born, and listen again to poor, flat, worm-eaten jokes that had given me the dry gripes when I was a boy thirteen hundred years afterwards.

It about convinced me that there isn’t any such thing as a new joke possible.

Everybody laughed at these antiquities—but then they always do; I had noticed that, centuries later. However, of course the scoffer didn’t laugh—I mean the boy. No, he scoffed; there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t scoff at.

Everybody laughed at these antiquities—but then they always do; I had noticed that, centuries later. However, of course the scoffer didn’t laugh—I mean the boy. No, he scoffed; there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t scoff at.

He said the most of Sir Dinadan’s jokes were rotten and the rest were petrified.

I said “petrified” was good; as I believed, myself, that the only right way to classify the majestic ages of some of those jokes was by geologic periods. But that neat idea hit the boy in a blank place, for geology hadn’t been invented yet.

Suppose Sir Walter, instead of putting the conversations into the mouths of his characters, had allowed the characters to speak for themselves? We should have had talk from Rebecca and Ivanhoe and the soft lady Rowena which would embarrass a tramp in our day.

However, to the unconsciously indelicate all things are delicate.

King Arthur’s people were not aware that they were indecent and I had presence of mind enough not to mention it.

He asked them why they were so dull—why didn’t it occur to them to strip me. In half a minute I was as naked as a pair of tongs! And dear, dear, to think of it: I was the only embarrassed person there.

Everybody discussed me; and did it as unconcernedly as if I had been a cabbage.

Queen Guenever was as naively interested as the rest, and said she had never seen anybody with legs just like mine before. It was the only compliment I got—if it was a compliment.

In the stillness and the darkness, realization soon began to supplement knowledge.

The mere knowledge of a fact is pale; but when you come to realize your 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;

If you went out at night, your servants carried torches. There were no books, pens, paper or ink, and no glass in the openings they believed to be windows.

It is a little thing⁠—glass is⁠—until it is absent, then it becomes a big thing.

But perhaps the worst of all was, that there wasn’t any sugar, coffee, tea, or tobacco.

… was an awful crash and that old tower leaped into the sky in chunks, along with a vast volcanic fountain of fire that turned night to noonday, and showed a thousand acres of human beings groveling on the ground in a general collapse of consternation.

Well, it rained mortar and masonry the rest of the week.

This was the report; but probably the facts would have modified it.

It was an effective miracle. The great bothersome temporary population vanished. There were a good many thousand tracks in the mud the next morning, but they were all outward bound.

If I had advertised another miracle I couldn’t have raised an audience with a sheriff.

Merlin’s stock was flat. The king wanted to stop his wages; he even wanted to banish him, but I interfered.

There wasn’t a rag of his tower left, but I had the government rebuild it for him, and advised him to take boarders; but he was too high-toned for that. And as for being grateful, he never even said thank you.

He was a rather hard lot, take him how you might; but then you couldn’t fairly expect a man to be sweet that had been set back so.

… reason that as Joseph’s splendid financial ingenuities advantaged nobody but the king, the general public must have regarded him with a good deal of disfavor, whereas I had done my entire public a kindness in sparing the sun, and was popular by reason of it.

I was no shadow of a king; I was the substance; the king himself was the shadow.

My power was colossal; and it was not a mere name, as such things have generally been, it was the genuine article. I stood here, at the very spring and source of the second great period of the world’s history;

Well, it was a curious country, and full of interest. And the people!

They were the quaintest and simplest and trustingest race; why, they were nothing but rabbits.

It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Church and nobility;

through the force of inherited ideas they were not able to conceive of anything being entitled to that except pedigree and lordship. There you see the hand of that awful power, the Roman Catholic Church.

In two or three little centuries it had converted a nation of men to a nation of worms.

Before the day of the Church’s supremacy in the world, men were men, and held their heads up, and had a man’s pride and spirit and independence; and what of greatness and position a person got, he got mainly by achievement, not by birth.

in fact, he was not merely contented with this strange condition of things, he was even able to persuade himself that he was proud of it.

It seems to show that there isn’t anything you can’t stand, if you are only born and bred to it.

Of course that taint, that reverence for rank and title, had been in our American blood, too—I know that; but when I left America it had disappeared—at least to all intents and purposes. The remnant of it was restricted to the dudes and dudesses.

They ruined an uncommon good old crosscut saw for me, and broke the sawbuck, too, but I let it pass. And as for my axe—well,

I made up my mind that the next time I lent an axe to a surgeon I would pick my century.

I not only watched this tournament from day to day, but detailed an intelligent priest from my Department of Public Morals and Agriculture, and ordered him to report it;

The first thing you want in a new country, is a patent office; then work up your school system; and after that, out with your paper.

A newspaper has its faults, and plenty of them, but no matter, it’s hark from the tomb for a dead nation, and don’t you forget it.

You can’t resurrect a dead nation without it; there isn’t any way. So I wanted to sample things, and be finding out what sort of reporter-material I might be able to rake together out of the sixth century when I should come to need it.

You see, it was just the Northwest Passage of that day, as you may say; that was all.

Every year expeditions went out holy grailing, and next year relief expeditions went out to hunt for them.

There was worlds of reputation in it, but no money. Why, they actually wanted me to put in! Well, I should smile.

Four years rolled by—and then! Well, you would never imagine it in the world. Unlimited power is the ideal thing when it is in safe hands.

The despotism of heaven is the one absolutely perfect government.

An earthly despotism would be the absolutely perfect earthly government, if the conditions were the same, namely, the despot the perfectest individual of the human race, and his lease of life perpetual.

Four years rolled by—and then! Well, you would never imagine it in the world.

Unlimited power is the ideal thing when it is in safe hands.

The despotism of heaven is the one absolutely perfect government. An earthly despotism would be the absolutely perfect earthly government, if the conditions were the same, namely, the despot the perfectest individual of the human race, and his lease of life perpetual.

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 faraway castle where she was held in captivity by a lawless scoundrel, usually a giant.

they had been languishing in that cruel captivity for twenty-six years; the masters of the castle were three stupendous brothers, each with four arms and one eye—the eye in the center of the forehead, and as big as a fruit.

Sort of fruit not mentioned; their usual slovenliness in statistics.

Would you believe it? The king and the whole Round Table were in raptures over this preposterous opportunity for adventure. Every knight of the Table jumped for the chance, and begged for it;

Indeed, I said I was glad. And in a way it was true;

I was as glad as a person is when he is scalped.

Well, one must make the best of things, and not waste time with useless fretting, but get down to business and see what can be done. In all lies there is wheat among the chaff; I must get at the wheat in this case:

In all lies there is wheat among the chaff; I must get at the wheat in this case: so I sent for the girl and she came.

She was a comely enough creature, and soft and modest, but, if signs went for anything, she didn’t know as much as a lady’s watch.

I said:

“What, a map? What are you talking about? Don’t you know what a map is? There, there, never mind, don’t explain,

I hate explanations; they fog a thing up so that you can’t tell anything about it.

Run along, dear; good day; show her the way, Clarence.”

It was but a little thing to promise—thirteen hundred years or so—and he so eager; so I said Yes. But I sighed; I couldn’t help it. And yet there was no sense in sighing, for she wasn’t born yet.

But that is the way we are made: we don’t reason, where we feel; we just feel.

My expedition was all the talk that day and that night, and the boys were very good to me, and made much of me, and seemed to have forgotten their vexation and disappointment, and come to be as anxious for me to hive those ogres …

This is no time to dance.

Well, a man that is packed away like that is a nut that isn’t worth the cracking, there is so little of the meat, when you get down to it, by comparison with the shell.

The boys helped me, or I never could have got in. Just as we finished, Sir Bedivere happened in, and I saw that as like as not I hadn’t chosen the most convenient outfit for a long trip. How stately he looked;

“Oh, what a guy!” And hove clods at us.

In my experience boys are the same in all ages.

They don’t respect anything, they don’t care for anything or anybody. They say “Go up, baldhead” to the prophet going his unoffending way in the gray of antiquity; they sass me in the holy gloom of the Middle Ages;

I remember, because I was there and helped. The prophet had his bears and settled with his boys; and I wanted to get down and settle with mine, but it wouldn’t answer, because I couldn’t have got up again.

I hate a country without a derrick.

and in fact I didn’t know it. I supposed it would be particularly convenient there. And so now, the thought of its being there, so handy and close by, and yet not get-at-able, made it all the worse and the harder to bear.

Yes, the thing that you can’t get is the thing that you want, mainly; everyone has noticed that.

Well, it took my mind off from everything else; took it clear off, and centered it in my helmet; and mile after mile, there it stayed, imagining the handkerchief, picturing the handkerchief;

I wanted to think that out; and moreover I wanted to think out some way to reform this evil and persuade the people to let the foolish fashion die out; but thinking was out of the question in the circumstances.

You couldn’t think, where Sandy was.

She was a quite biddable creature and good-hearted, but she had a flow of talk that was as steady as a mill, and made your head sore like the drays and wagons in a city.

She was a quite biddable creature and good-hearted, but she had a flow of talk that was as steady as a mill, and made your head sore like the drays and wagons in a city.

If she had had a cork she would have been a comfort. But you can’t cork that kind; they would die.

Her clack was going all day, and you would think something would surely happen to her works, by and by; but no, they never got out of order; and she never had to slack up for words.

and she never had to slack up for words. She could grind, and pump, and churn, and buzz by the week, and never stop to oil up or blow out. And yet the result was just nothing but wind.

She never had any ideas, any more than a fog has.

She was a perfect blatherskite; I mean for jaw, jaw, jaw, talk, talk, talk, jabber, jabber, jabber; but just as good as she could be. I hadn’t minded her mill that morning, on account of having that hornets’ nest of other troubles;

Still, if one did not roll and thrash around he would die; so perhaps it is as well to do one way as the other; there is no real choice.

Even after I was frozen solid I could still distinguish that tickling, just as a corpse does when he is taking electric treatment.

I said I would never wear armor after this trip.

Why, she was as fresh as a squirrel; she had slept like the dead; and as for a bath, probably neither she nor any other noble in the land had ever had one, and so she was not missing it.

Measured by modern standards, they were merely modified savages, those people.

This noble lady showed no impatience to get to breakfast—and that smacks of the savage, too. On their journeys those Britons were used to long fasts, and knew how to bear them;

You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its officeholders.

The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.

To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags—that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it.

it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.

To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags⁠—that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it.

I was from Connecticut, whose Constitution declares “that all political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority and instituted for their benefit;

but I knew that the Jack Cade or the Wat Tyler who tries such a thing without first educating his materials up to revolution grade is almost absolutely certain to get left.

I had never been accustomed to getting left, even if I do say it myself.

Wherefore, the “deal” which had been for some time working into shape in my mind was of a quite different pattern from the Cade-Tyler sort.

So to speak, I was become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends.

It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal.

The thing that would have best suited the circus side of my nature would have been to resign the Boss-ship and get up an insurrection and turn it into a revolution;

No, they came in a body, they came with a whirr and a rush, they came like a volley from a battery; came with heads low down, plumes streaming out behind, lances advanced at a level.

It was a handsome sight, a beautiful sight⁠—for a man up a tree.

I laid my lance in rest and waited, with my heart beating, till the iron wave was just ready to break over me, then spouted a column of white smoke through the bars of my helmet.

“

Celluloid teeth, nine dollars a set, as like as not⁠—the loose-fit kind, that go up and down like a portcullis when you eat, and fall out when you laugh.

”

just to hear her dear voice come melting back to me with a “Hello, Hank!” that was music of the spheres to my enchanted ear.

She got three dollars a week, but she was worth it.

I could not follow Alisande’s further explanation of who our captured knights were, now—I mean in case she should ever get to explaining who they were. My interest was gone, my thoughts were far away, and sad.

… merely noted in a vague way that each of these three knights took one of these three damsels up behind him on his horse, and one rode north, another east, the other south, to seek adventures, and meet again and lie, after year and day.

Year and day⁠—and without baggage. It was of a piece with the general simplicity of the country.

The sun was now setting. It was about three in the afternoon when Alisande had begun to tell me who the cowboys were; so she had made pretty good progress with it—for her.

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 percent; 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 doorbell—I mean hailing the warders—it was the sensible thing to do.

… that this castle was the abode of Morgan le Fay, sister of King Arthur, and wife of King Uriens, monarch of a realm about as big as the District of Columbia—you could stand in the middle of it and throw bricks into the next kingdom.

“Kings” and “Kingdoms” were as thick in Britain as they had been in little Palestine in Joshua’s time, when people had to sleep with their knees pulled up because they couldn’t stretch out without a passport.

La Cote was much depressed, for he had scored here the worst failure of his campaign. He had not worked off a cake; yet he had tried all the tricks of the trade, even to the washing of a hermit; but the hermit died.

“Forbear to grieve, fair knight, for this is not a defeat.

We have brains, you and I; and for such as have brains there are no defeats, but only victories.

Observe how we will turn this seeming disaster into an advertisement; an advertisement for our soap; and the biggest one, to draw, that was ever thought of; an advertisement that will transform that Mount Washington defeat into a Matterhorn victory.

“

Well, a body is bound to admit that for just a modest little one-line ad, it’s a corker.

”

… 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!

Poor child! he slumped to the floor, twisted his silken limbs in one great straining contortion of pain, and was dead. Out of the old king was wrung an involuntary “O-h!” of compassion.

Now what a happy idea that was!—and so simple; yet it would never have occurred to me.

I was born modest; not all over, but in spots; and this was one of the spots.

The effect upon madame was electrical. It cleared her countenance and brought back her smiles and all her persuasive graces and blandishments; but nevertheless she was not able to entirely cover up with them the fact that she was in a ghastly fright. She said:

It was new, and ought to have been rehearsed a little more.

For some reason or other the queen had the composer hanged, after dinner.

After this music, the priest who stood behind the royal table said a noble long grace in ostensible Latin. Then the battalion of waiters broke away from their posts, and darted, rushed, flew, fetched and carried, and the mighty feeding began;

Then the battalion of waiters broke away from their posts, and darted, rushed, flew, fetched and carried, and the mighty feeding began; no words anywhere, but absorbing attention to business.

The rows of chops opened and shut in vast unison, and the sound of it was like to the muffled burr of subterranean machinery.

The havoc continued an hour and a half, and unimaginable was the destruction of substantials. Of the chief feature of the feast—the huge wild boar that lay stretched out so portly and imposing at the start—nothing was left but the semblance of a hoop-skirt;

I therefore considered the matter thoughtfully, and ended by having the musicians ordered into our presence to play that Sweet Bye and Bye again, which they did.

Then I saw that she was right, and gave her permission to hang the whole band.

This little relaxation of sternness had a good effect upon the queen. A statesman gains little by the arbitrary exercise of ironclad authority upon all occasions that offer, for this wounds the just pride of his subordinates, and thus tends to undermine his strength.

“He will not confess, else; and then were his soul lost. For his crime his life is forfeited by the law—and of a surety will I see that he payeth it!—but it were peril to my own soul to let him die unconfessed and unabsolved.

Nay, I were a fool to fling me into hell for his accommodation.

”

It was the stubborn unreasoning of the time. It was useless to argue with her.

Arguments have no chance against petrified training; they wear it as little as the waves wear a cliff.

And her training was everybody’s. The brightest intellect in the land would not have been able to see that her position was defective.

“Ye will do in all things as this lord shall command. It is The Boss.”

It was certainly a good word to conjure with: you could see it by the squirming of these rats.

The queen’s guards fell into line, and she and they marched away, with their torchbearers, and woke the echoes of the cavernous tunnels with the measured beat of their retreating footfalls.

Oh, it was no use to waste sense on her.

Training⁠—training is everything; training is all there is to a person.

We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own;

and yet how foolish it was to think so. If we look at it in another way, we see how absurd it is: if I had an anvil in me would I prize it? Of course not.

And yet when you come to think, there is no real difference between a conscience and an anvil⁠—I mean for comfort.

I have noticed it a thousand times. And you could dissolve an anvil with acids, when you couldn’t stand it any longer; but there isn’t any way that you can work off a conscience—at least so it will stay worked off;

I had had enough of this grisly place by this time, and wanted to leave, but I couldn’t, because I had something on my mind that my conscience kept prodding me about, and wouldn’t let me forget.

If I had the remaking of man, he wouldn’t have any conscience.

It is one of the most disagreeable things connected with a person; and although it certainly does a great deal of good, it cannot be said to pay, in the long run; it would be much better to have less good and more comfort.

On his wrists and ankles were cicatrices, old smooth scars, and fastened to the stone on which he sat was a chain with manacles and fetters attached; but this apparatus lay idle on the ground, and was thick with rust.

Chains cease to be needed after the spirit has gone out of a prisoner.

I could not rouse the man; so I said we would take him to her, and see—to the bride who was the fairest thing in the Earth to him, once—roses, pearls, and dew made flesh, for him; a wonderwork, the masterwork of nature:

And yet his crime was committed more in thoughtlessness than deliberate depravity. He had said she had red hair. Well, she had; but that was no way to speak of it.

When redheaded people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.

Consider it: among these forty-seven captives there were five whose names, offenses, and dates of incarceration were no longer known! One woman and four men—all bent, and wrinkled, and mind-extinguished patriarchs. They themselves had long ago forgotten these details;

So here she was, forecasting the veritable history of future prisoners of the Castle d’If, without knowing it. It seemed plain to me now, that with her training, those inherited prisoners were merely property—nothing more, nothing less.

Well, when we inherit property, it does not occur to us to throw it away, even when we do not value it.

When I brought my procession of human bats up into the open world and the glare of the afternoon sun—previously blindfolding them, in charity for eyes so long untortured by light—they were a spectacle to look at. Skeletons, scarecrows, goblins, pathetic frights, every one;

Well, she certainly was a curious one, was Morgan le Fay. I have seen a good many kinds of women in my time, but she laid over them all for variety. And how sharply characteristic of her this episode was.

She had no more idea than a horse of how to photograph a procession; but being in doubt, it was just like her to try to do it with an axe.

Yes, here was a curious revelation, indeed, of the depth to which this people had been sunk in slavery. Their entire being was reduced to a monotonous dead level of patience, resignation, dumb uncomplaining acceptance of whatever might befall them in this life.

Their very imagination was dead. When you can say that of a man, he has struck bottom, I reckon; there is no lower deep for him.

I rather wished I had gone some other road. This was not the sort of experience for a statesman to encounter who was planning out a peaceful revolution in his mind.

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.

Of course, the whole drove was housed in the house, and, great guns!—well, I never saw anything like it. Nor ever heard anything like it. And never smelt anything like it.

It was like an insurrection in a gasometer.

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 yet, from my point of view she was acting like a crazy woman.

My land, the power of training! of influence! of education! It can bring a body up to believe anything.

I had to put myself in Sandy’s place to realize that she was not a lunatic. Yes, and put her in mine, to demonstrate how easy it is to seem a lunatic to a person who has not been taught as you have been taught.

… 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 beings.

We made good time; and a couple of hours before sunset we stood upon the high confines of the Valley of Holiness, and our eyes swept it from end to end and noted its features. That is, its large features.

It was my idea to appoint Merlin. However, it was plain that there was no occasion for the bomb. One cannot have everything the way he would like it.

A man has no business to be depressed by a disappointment, anyway; he ought to make up his mind to get even.

That is what I did. I said to myself, I am in no hurry, I can wait; that bomb will come good yet. And it did, too.

… and tolled their bells for heavenly succor till they all dried up and blew away, and no innocent of them all would ever have thought to drop a fish-line into the well or go down in it and find out what was really the matter.

Old habit of mind is one of the toughest things to get away from in the world.

It transmits itself like physical form and feature; and for a man, in those days, to have had an idea that his ancestors hadn’t had, would have brought him under suspicion of being illegitimate. I said to the monk:

As a matter of business it was a good idea to get the notion around that the thing was difficult.

Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.

That monk was filled up with the difficulty of this enterprise; he would fill up the others. In two days the solicitude would be booming.

She had exactly the German way; whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die.

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

We drifted from hermit to hermit all the afternoon. It was a most strange menagerie. The chief emulation among them seemed to be, to see which could manage to be the uncleanest and most prosperous with vermin.

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.

“Most gladly, yea, 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:

Well, the king was out of the hole; 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;

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 Astolat 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 …

He did his honest best, but lord, it was no great things.

He looked as humble as the leaning tower at 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 flunkey at the tail end of it raised his whip;

From that time out, I prophesied myself baldheaded 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 take 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 king looked puzzled—he wasn’t a very heavy weight, intellectually.

His head was an hourglass; it could stow an idea, but it had to do it a grain at a time, not the whole idea at once.

“Would you have a seat also—and sit?”

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 the 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.

… 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;

There it was, you see.

A man is a man, at bottom. Whole ages of abuse and oppression cannot crush the manhood clear out of him.

Whoever thinks it a mistake is himself mistaken. Yes, there is plenty good enough material for a republic in the most degraded people that ever existed—even the Russians;

to the gentleman he was abject; with the small farmer and the free mechanic he was cordial and gossipy; and when a slave passed by with a countenance respectfully lowered, this chap’s nose was in the air—he couldn’t even see him.

Well, there are times when one would like to hang the whole human race and finish the farce.

Presently we struck an incident. A small mob of half-naked boys and girls came tearing out of the woods, scared and shrieking. The eldest among them were not more than twelve or fourteen years old.

if the wages be high, the nation is prosperous; if low, it isn’t. Which is an error.

It isn’t what sum you get, it’s how much you can buy with it, that’s the important thing

; and it’s that that tells whether your wages are high in fact or only high in name. I could remember how it was in the time of our great civil war in the nineteenth century.

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 see, 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 course you can insult him, I only mean it’s difficult;

Carry it through the year; he would save nearly a week’s wages every two months, your man nothing; thus saving five or six weeks’ wages in a year, your man not a cent.

Now I reckon you understand that ‘high wages’ and ‘low wages’ are phrases that don’t mean anything in the world until you find out which of them will buy the most!

”

You see, he knew his own laws just as other people so often know the laws; by words, not by effects.

They take a meaning, and get to be very vivid, when you come to apply them to yourself.

All hands shook their heads and looked disappointed; some turned away, no longer interested. The orator said—and this time in the tones of business, not of sentiment:

… his chief minister, marching manacled and fettered and yoked, in a slave convoy, could move by all manner of idle men and women, and under windows where sat the sweet and the lovely, and yet never attract a curious eye, never provoke a single remark.

Dear, dear, it only shows that there is nothing diviner about a king than there is about a tramp, after all.

He is just a cheap and hollow artificiality when you don’t know he is a king. But reveal his quality, and dear me it takes your very breath away to look at him. I reckon we are all fools. Born so, no doubt.

Dear, dear, it only shows that there is nothing diviner about a king than there is about a tramp, after all.

He is just a cheap and hollow artificiality when you don’t know he is a king.

But reveal his quality, and dear me it takes your very breath away to look at him. I reckon we are all fools. Born so, no doubt.

So he gave up at last, and left the king in possession of his style unimpaired.

The fact is, the king was a good deal more than a king, he was a man; and when a man is a man, you can’t knock it out of him.

We had a rough time for a month, tramping to and fro in the earth, and suffering. And what Englishman was the most interested in the slavery question by that time? His grace the king! Yes;

“

Law is intended to mete out justice. Sometimes it fails.

This cannot be helped. We can only grieve, and be resigned, and pray for the soul of him who falls unfairly by the arm of the law, and that his fellows may be few.

“Oh, my child, my darling, it will die! It has no home, it has no father, no friend, no mother—”

“It has them all!” said that good priest. “All these will I be to it till I die.”

You should have seen her face then! Gratitude? Lord, what do you want with words to express that? Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

You should have seen her face then! Gratitude? Lord, what do you want with words to express that?

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

She gave that look, and carried it away to the treasury of heaven, where all things that are divine belong.

“On your knees, every rascal of you, and salute the king! Who fails shall sup in hell tonight!”

I always use that high style when I’m climaxing an effect.

Well, it was noble to see Launcelot and the boys swarm up onto that scaffold and heave sheriffs and such overboard.

The next moment the rope sprang taut and yanked Sir Sagramor out of the saddle! Great Scott, but there was a sensation!

Unquestionably, the popular thing in this world is novelty.

These people had never seen anything of that cowboy business before, and it carried them clear off their feet with delight. From all around and everywhere, the shout went up:

And Brer Merlin? His stock was flat again.

Somehow, every time the magic of fol-de-rol tried conclusions with the magic of science, the magic of fol-de-rol got left.

Clarence was with me as concerned the revolution, but in a modified way. His idea was a republic, without privileged orders, but with a hereditary royal family at the head of it instead of an elective chief magistrate.

He believed that no nation that had ever known the joy of worshiping a royal family could ever be robbed of it and not fade away and die of melancholy.

I urged that kings were dangerous. He said, then have cats. He was sure that a royal family of cats would answer every purpose.

He believed that no nation that had ever known the joy of worshiping a royal family could ever be robbed of it and not fade away and die of melancholy.

I urged that kings were dangerous. He said, then have cats.

He was sure that a royal family of cats would answer every purpose.

I glanced up at the belfry, and there hung the bell, shrouded in black, and its tongue tied back. Now I knew! Now I understood the stupendous calamity that had overtaken England.

Invasion? Invasion is a triviality to it. It was the Interdict!

I asked no questions; I didn’t need to ask any. The Church had struck; the thing for me to do was to get into a disguise, and go warily.

Toward the end of the week I began to get this large and disenchanting fact through my head: that the mass of the nation had swung their caps and shouted for the republic for about one day, and there an end!

The Church, the nobles, and the gentry then turned one grand, all-disapproving frown upon them and shriveled them into sheep!

From that moment the sheep had begun to gather to the fold—that is to say, the camps—and offer their valueless lives and their valuable wool to the “righteous cause.”