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.
They were so troubled about my enchanted clothes that
they were mightily relieved, at last, when old Merlin
swept the difficulty away for them with a common-sense
hint. 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.
Finally I was carried off in one direction, and my
perilous clothes in another. I was shoved into
a dark and narrow cell in a dungeon, with some scant
remnants for dinner, some moldy straw for a bed, and
no end of rats for company.
AN INSPIRATION
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 time. My first thought 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 light flashed in my eyes, and that butterfly,
Clarence, stood before me! I gasped with surprise;
my breath almost got away from me.
“What!” I said, “you here yet?
Go along with the rest of the dream! scatter!”
But he only laughed, in his light-hearted way, and
fell to making fun of my sorry plight.
“All right,” I said resignedly, “let
the dream go on; I’m in no hurry.”
“Prithee what dream?”
“What dream? Why, the dream that I am
in Arthur’s court—a person who never
existed; and that I am talking to you, who are nothing
but a work of the imagination.”
“Oh, la, indeed! and is it a dream that you’re
to be burned to-morrow? Ho-ho—answer
me that!”
The shock that went through me was distressing.
I now began to reason that my situation was in the
last degree serious, dream or no dream; for I knew
by past experience of the lifelike intensity of dreams,
that to be burned to death, even in a dream, would
be very far from being a jest, and was a thing to
be avoided, by any means, fair or foul, that I could
contrive. So I said beseechingly:
