The day was mine. Knight-errantry was a doomed
institution. The march of civilization was begun.
How did I feel? Ah, you never could imagine
it.
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.
THREE YEARS LATER
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 workshops 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 see, I was “bluffing” that last time
in the field; it would be natural for them to work
around to that conclusion, if I gave them a chance.
So I must not give them time; and I didn’t.
I renewed my challenge, engraved it on brass, posted
it up where any priest could read it to them, and
also kept it standing in the advertising columns of
the paper.
I not only renewed it, but added to its proportions.
I said, name the day, and I would take fifty assistants
and stand up against the massed chivalry of the
whole earth and destroy it.
I was not bluffing this time. I meant what I
said; I could do what I promised. There wasn’t
any way to misunderstand the language of that challenge.
Even the dullest of the chivalry perceived that this
was a plain case of “put up, or shut up.”
They were wise and did the latter. In all the
next three years they gave me no trouble worth mentioning.
Consider the three years sped. Now look around
on England. A happy and prosperous country,
and strangely altered. Schools everywhere, and
several colleges; a number of pretty good newspapers.
Even authorship was taking a start; Sir Dinadan the
Humorist was first in the field, with a volume of
gray-headed jokes which I had been familiar with during
thirteen centuries. If he had left out that
old rancid one about the lecturer I wouldn’t
have said anything; but I couldn’t stand that
one. I suppressed the book and hanged the author.
Slavery was dead and gone; all men were equal before
the law; taxation had been equalized. The telegraph,
the telephone, the phonograph, the typewriter, the
sewing-machine, and all the thousand willing and handy
servants of steam and electricity were working their
way into favor. We had a steamboat or two on
the Thames, we had steam warships, and the beginnings
of a steam commercial marine; I was getting ready
to send out an expedition to discover America.
