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 seignory; 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 encoring it
every time we had a good subject, and that would be
inconvenient, because I hadn’t any more bombs
along.
CHAPTER XXVIII
DRILLING THE KING
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 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.
