A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court | Page 6

satisfied with himself. He
was pretty enough to frame. He arrived, looked me over with a smiling and impudent
curiosity; said he had come for me, and informed me that he was a page.
"Go 'long," I said; "you ain't more than a paragraph."
It was pretty severe, but I was nettled. However, it never phazed him; he didn't appear to
know he was hurt. He began to talk and laugh, in happy, thoughtless, boyish fashion, as
we walked along, and made himself old friends with me at once; asked me all sorts of
questions about myself and about my clothes, but never waited for an answer--always
chattered straight ahead, as if he didn't know he had asked a question and wasn't
expecting any reply, until at last he happened to mention that he was born in the
beginning of the year 513.
It made the cold chills creep over me! I stopped and said, a little faintly:
"Maybe I didn't hear you just right. Say it again--and say it slow. What year was it?"
"513."
"513! You don't look it! Come, my boy, I am a stranger and friendless; be honest and
honorable with me. Are you in your right mind?"

He said he was.
"Are these other people in their right minds?"
He said they were.
"And this isn't an asylum? I mean, it isn't a place where they cure crazy people?"
He said it wasn't.
"Well, then," I said, "either I am a lunatic, or something just as awful has happened. Now
tell me, honest and true, where am I?"
"IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT."
I waited a minute, to let that idea shudder its way home, and then said:
"And according to your notions, what year is it now?"
"528--nineteenth of June."
I felt a mournful sinking at the heart, and muttered: "I shall never see my friends
again--never, never again. They will not be born for more than thirteen hundred years
yet."
I seemed to believe the boy, I didn't know why. Something in me seemed to believe
him--my consciousness, as you may say; but my reason didn't. My reason straightway
began to clamor; that was natural. I didn't know how to go about satisfying it, because I
knew that the testimony of men wouldn't serve--my reason would say they were lunatics,
and throw out their evidence. But all of a sudden I stumbled on the very thing, just by
luck. I knew that the only total eclipse of the sun in the first half of the sixth century
occurred on the 21st of June, A.D. 528, O.S., and began at 3 minutes after 12 noon. I also
knew that no total eclipse of the sun was due in what to me was the present year--i.e.,
1879. So, if I could keep my anxiety and curiosity from eating the heart out of me for
forty-eight hours, I should then find out for certain whether this boy was telling me the
truth or not.
Wherefore, being a practical Connecticut man, I now shoved this whole problem clear
out of my mind till its appointed day and hour should come, in order that I might turn all
my attention to the circumstances of the present moment, and be alert and ready to make
the most out of them that could be made. One thing at a time, is my motto--and just play
that thing for all it is worth, even if it's only two pair and a jack. I made up my mind to
two things: if it was still the nineteenth century and I was among lunatics and couldn't get
away, I would presently boss that asylum or know the reason why; and if, on the other
hand, it was really the sixth century, all right, I didn't want any softer thing: I would boss
the whole country inside of three months; for I judged I would have the start of the
best-educated man in the kingdom by a matter of thirteen hundred years and upward. I'm
not a man to waste time after my mind's made up and there's work on hand; so I said to

the page:
"Now, Clarence, my boy--if that might happen to be your name-- I'll get you to post me
up a little if you don't mind. What is the name of that apparition that brought me here?"
"My master and thine? That is the good knight and great lord Sir Kay the Seneschal,
foster brother to our liege the king."
"Very good; go on, tell me everything."
He made a long story of it; but the part that had immediate interest for me was this: He
said I was Sir Kay's prisoner, and that in the due course of custom I would be flung into a
dungeon and left there on scant