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.
THE PILGRIMS
When I did get to bed at last I was unspeakably tired;
the stretching out, and the relaxing of the long-tense
muscles, how luxurious, how delicious! but that was
as far as I could get—sleep was out of
the question for the present. The ripping and
tearing and squealing of the nobility up and down
the halls and corridors was pandemonium come again,
and kept me broad awake. 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. If
I had told Sandy I had seen a wagon, uninfluenced
by enchantment, spin along fifty miles an hour; had
seen a man, unequipped with magic powers, get into
a basket and soar out of sight among the clouds; and
had listened, without any necromancer’s help,
to the conversation of a person who was several hundred
miles away, Sandy would not merely have supposed me
to be crazy, she would have thought she knew it.
Everybody around her believed in enchantments; nobody
had any doubts; to doubt that a castle could be turned
into a sty, and its occupants into hogs, would have
been the same as my doubting among Connecticut people
the actuality of the telephone and its wonders,—and
in both cases would be absolute proof of a diseased
mind, an unsettled reason. Yes, Sandy was sane;
that must be admitted. If I also would be sane—to
Sandy —I must keep my superstitions about
unenchanted and unmiraculous locomotives, balloons,
and telephones, to myself. Also, I believed
that the world was not flat, and hadn’t pillars
under it to support it, nor a canopy over it to turn
off a universe of water that occupied all space above;
but as I was the only person in the kingdom afflicted
with such impious and criminal opinions, I recognized
that it would be good wisdom to keep quiet about this
matter, too, if I did not wish to be suddenly shunned
and forsaken by everybody as a madman.
The next morning Sandy assembled the swine in the
dining-room and gave them their breakfast, waiting
upon them personally and manifesting in every way
the deep reverence which the natives of her island,
ancient and modern, have always felt for rank, let
its outward casket and the mental and moral contents
be what they may. I could have eaten with the
hogs if I had had birth approaching my lofty official
rank; but I hadn’t, and so accepted the unavoidable
slight and made no complaint. Sandy and I had
our breakfast at the second table. The family
were not at home. I said:
