A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain [little readers .TXT] 📗

He was so set up that he concluded to make a speech—of course a humorous speech.  I think I never heard so many old played-out jokes strung together in my life.  He was worse than the minstrels, worse than the clown in the circus.  It seemed peculiarly sad to sit here, thirteen hundred years before I was born, and listen again to poor, flat, worm-eaten jokes that had given me the dry gripes when I was a boy thirteen hundred years afterwards.  It about convinced me that there isn’t any such thing as a new joke possible.  Everybody laughed at these antiquities—but then they always do; I had noticed that, centuries later. However, of course the scoffer didn’t laugh—I mean the boy.  No, he scoffed; there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t scoff at. He said the most of Sir Dinadan’s jokes were rotten and the rest were petrified.  I said “petrified” was good; as I believed, myself, that the only right way to classify the majestic ages of some of those jokes was by geologic periods.  But that neat idea hit the boy in a blank place, for geology hadn’t been invented yet. However, I made a note of the remark, and calculated to educate the commonwealth up to it if I pulled through.  It is no use to throw a good thing away merely because the market isn’t ripe yet.

Now Sir Kay arose and began to fire up on his history-mill with me for fuel.  It was time for me to feel serious, and I did.  Sir Kay told how he had encountered me in a far land of barbarians, who all wore the same ridiculous garb that I did—a garb that was a work of enchantment, and intended to make the wearer secure from hurt by human hands.  However he had nullified the force of the enchantment by prayer, and had killed my thirteen knights in a three hours’ battle, and taken me prisoner, sparing my life in order that so strange a curiosity as I was might be exhibited to the wonder and admiration of the king and the court.  He spoke of me all the time, in the blandest way, as “this prodigious giant,” and “this horrible sky-towering monster,” and “this tusked and taloned man-devouring ogre”, and everybody took in all this bosh in the naivest way, and never smiled or seemed to notice that there was any discrepancy between these watered statistics and me. He said that in trying to escape from him I sprang into the top of a tree two hundred cubits high at a single bound, but he dislodged me with a stone the size of a cow, which “all-to brast” the most of my bones, and then swore me to appear at Arthur’s court for sentence.  He ended by condemning me to die at noon on the 21st; and was so little concerned about it that he stopped to yawn before he named the date.

I was in a dismal state by this time; indeed, I was hardly enough in my right mind to keep the run of a dispute that sprung up as to how I had better be killed, the possibility of the killing being doubted by some, because of the enchantment in my clothes. And yet it was nothing but an ordinary suit of fifteen-dollar slop-shops. Still, I was sane enough to notice this detail, to wit:  many of the terms used in the most matter-of-fact way by this great assemblage of the first ladies and gentlemen in the land would have made a Comanche blush.

Indelicacy is too mild a term to convey the idea.  However, I had read “Tom Jones,” and “Roderick Random,” and other books of that kind, and knew that the highest and first ladies and gentlemen in England had remained little or no cleaner in their talk, and in the morals and conduct which such talk implies, clear up to a hundred years ago; in fact clear