A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain (sneezy the snowman read aloud .TXT) 📖

What a welcome disappointment I experienced!  I said:

“Castle?  It is nothing but a pigsty; a pigsty with a wattled fence around it.”

She looked surprised and distressed.  The animation faded out of her face; and during many moments she was lost in thought and silent.  Then:

“It was not enchanted aforetime,” she said in a musing fashion, as if to herself.  "And how strange is this marvel, and how awful—that to the one perception it is enchanted and dight in a base and shameful aspect; yet to the perception of the other it is not enchanted, hath suffered no change, but stands firm and stately still, girt with its moat and waving its banners in the blue air from its towers.  And God shield us, how it pricks the heart to see again these gracious captives, and the sorrow deepened in their sweet faces!  We have tarried along, and are to blame.”

I saw my cue.  The castle was enchanted to me , not to her. It would be wasted time to try to argue her out of her delusion, it couldn’t be done; I must just humor it.  So I said:

“This is a common case—the enchanting of a thing to one eye and leaving it in its proper form to another.  You have heard of it before, Sandy, though you haven’t happened to experience it. But no harm is done.  In fact, it is lucky the way it is.  If these ladies were hogs to everybody and to themselves, it would be necessary to break the enchantment, and that might be impossible if one failed to find out the particular process of the enchantment. And hazardous, too; for in attempting a disenchantment without the true key, you are liable to err, and turn your hogs into dogs, and the dogs into cats, the cats into rats, and so on, and end by reducing your materials to nothing finally, or to an odorless gas which you can’t follow—which, of course, amounts to the same thing.  But here, by good luck, no one’s eyes but mine are under the enchantment, and so it is of no consequence to dissolve it. These ladies remain ladies to you, and to themselves, and to everybody else; and at the same time they will suffer in no way from my delusion, for when I know that an ostensible hog is a lady, that is enough for me, I know how to treat her.”

“Thanks, oh, sweet my lord, thou talkest like an angel.  And I know that thou wilt deliver them, for that thou art minded to great deeds and art as strong a knight of your hands and as brave to will and to do, as any that is on live.”

“I will not leave a princess in the sty, Sandy.  Are those three yonder that to my disordered eyes are starveling swine-herds—”

“The ogres, Are they changed also?  It is most wonderful.  Now am I fearful; for how canst thou strike with sure aim when five of their nine cubits of stature are to thee invisible?  Ah, go warily, fair sir; this is a mightier emprise than I wend.”

“You be easy, Sandy.  All I need to know is, how much of an ogre is invisible; then I know how to locate his vitals.  Don’t you be afraid, I will make short work of these bunco-steerers.  Stay where you are.”

I left Sandy kneeling there, corpse-faced but plucky and hopeful, and rode down to the pigsty, and struck up a trade with the swine-herds.  I won their gratitude by buying out all the hogs at the lump sum of sixteen pennies, which was rather above latest quotations.  I was just in time; for the Church, the lord of the manor, and the rest of the tax-gatherers would have been along next day and swept off pretty much all the stock, leaving the swine-herds very short of hogs and Sandy out of princesses.  But now the tax people could be paid in cash, and there would be a stake left besides.  One of the men had ten children; and he said that last year when a priest came and of his ten pigs took the fattest one for tithes, the wife burst out upon him, and offered him a child and said:

“Thou beast without bowels of mercy, why leave me my child, yet rob me of the wherewithal to feed it?”

How curious.  The same thing had happened in the Wales of my day, under this same old Established Church, which was supposed by many to have changed its nature when it changed its disguise.

I sent the three men away, and then opened the sty gate and beckoned Sandy to come—which she did; and not leisurely, but with the rush of a prairie fire.  And when I saw her fling herself upon those hogs, with tears of joy running down her cheeks, and strain them to her heart, and kiss them, and caress them, and call them reverently by grand princely names, I was ashamed of her, ashamed of the human race.

We had to drive those hogs home—ten miles; and no ladies were ever more fickle-minded or contrary.  They would stay in no road, no path; they broke out through the brush on all sides, and flowed away in all directions, over rocks, and hills, and the roughest places they could find.  And they must not be struck, or roughly accosted; Sandy could not bear to see them treated in ways unbecoming their rank.  The troublesomest old sow of the lot had to be called my Lady, and your Highness, like the rest.  It is annoying and difficult to scour around after hogs, in armor.  There was one small countess, with an iron ring in her snout and hardly any hair on her back, that was the devil for perversity.  She gave me a race of an hour,