I am an American. I was born and reared in Hartford, in the State of
Connecticut—anyway, just over the river, in the country. So I am a
Yankee of the Yankees—and practical, yes, and nearly barren of
sentiment, I suppose—or poetry, in other words. My father was a
blacksmith, my uncle was a horse doctor, and I was both, along at first.
Then I went over to the great arms factory and learned my real trade;
learned all there was to it; learned to make everything: guns,
revolvers, cannon, boilers, engines, all sorts of labor-saving
machinery. Why, I could make anything a body wanted—anything in the
world, it didn’t make any difference what; and if there wasn’t any quick
new-fangled way to make a thing, I could invent one—and do it as easy as
rolling off a log. I became head superintendent; had a couple of
thousand men under me.
Well, a man like that is a man that is full of fight—that goes without
saying. With a couple of thousand men under one, one has plenty of that
sort of amusement. I had, anyway. At last I met my match, and I got my
dose. It was during a misunderstanding conducted with crowbars with a
fellow we used to call Hercules. He laid me out with a crusher alongside
the head that made everything crack, and seemed to spring every joint in
my skull and make it overlap its neighbor. Then the world went out in
darkness, and I didn’t feel anything more, and didn’t know anything at
all—at least for a while.
When I came to again, I was sitting under an oak tree, on the grass,
with a whole beautiful and broad country landscape all to myself—nearly.
Not entirely; for there was a fellow on a horse, looking down at me—a
fellow fresh out of a picture-book. He was in old-time iron armor from
head to heel, with a helmet on his head the shape of a nail-keg with
slits in it; and he had a shield, and a sword, and a prodigious spear;
and his horse had armor on, too, and a steel horn projecting from his
forehead, and gorgeous red and green silk trappings that hung down all
around him like a bedquilt, nearly to the ground.
“Fair sir, will ye just?” said this fellow.
“Will I which?”
“Will ye try a passage of arms for land or lady or for——”
“What are you giving me?” I said. “Get along back to your circus, or
I’ll report you.”
Now what does this man do but fall back a couple of hundred yards and
then come rushing at me as hard as he could tear, with his nail-keg bent
down nearly to his horse’s neck and his long spear pointed straight
ahead. I saw he meant business, so I was up the tree when he arrived.
He allowed that I was his property, the captive of his spear. There was
argument on his side—and the bulk of the advantage—so I judged it best
to humor him. We fixed up an agreement whereby I was to go with him and
he was not to hurt me. I came down, and we started away, I walking by
the side of his horse. We marched comfortably along, through glades and
over brooks which I could not remember to have seen before—which puzzled
me and made me wonder—and yet we did not come to any circus or sign of a
circus. So I gave up the idea of a circus, and concluded he was from an
asylum. But we never came to an asylum—so I was up a stump, as you may
say. I asked him how far we were from Hartford. He said he had never
heard of the place; which I took to be a lie, but allowed it to go at
that. At the end of an hour we saw a far-away town sleeping in a valley
by a winding river; and beyond it on a hill, a vast gray fortress, with
towers and turrets, the first I had ever seen out of a picture.
“Bridgeport,” said I, pointing.
“Camelot,” said he.
My stranger had been showing signs of sleepiness. He caught himself
nodding, now, and smiled one of those pathetic, obsolete smiles of his,
and said:
“I find I can’t go on; but come with me, I’ve got it all written out,
and you can read it, if you like.”
In his chamber, he said: “First, I kept a journal; then by and by, after
years, I took the journal and turned it into a book. How long ago that
was!”
He handed me his manuscript, and pointed out the place where I should
begin:
“Begin here—I’ve already told you what goes before.” He was steeped in
drowsiness by this time. As I went out at his door I heard him murmur
sleepily: “Give you good den, fair sir.”
I sat down by my fire and examined my treasure. The first part of it—the
great bulk of it—was parchment, and yellow with age. I scanned a leaf
particularly and saw that it was a palimpsest. Under the old dim writing
of the Yankee historian appeared traces of a penmanship which was older
and dimmer still—Latin words and sentences: fragments from old monkish
legends, evidently. I turned to the place indicated by my stranger and
began to read.