A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain (books for 7th graders txt) 📖

“Ah, brother, ’tis nothing—such hospitality!”

“But it is something; the best a man has, freely given, is always something, and is as good as a prince can do, and ranks right along beside it—for even a prince can but do his best.  And so we’ll shop around and get up this layout now, and don’t you worry about the expense.  I’m one of the worst spendthrifts that ever was born.  Why, do you know, sometimes in a single week I spend—but never mind about that—you’d never believe it anyway.”

And so we went gadding along, dropping in here and there, pricing things, and gossiping with the shopkeepers about the riot, and now and then running across pathetic reminders of it, in the persons of shunned and tearful and houseless remnants of families whose homes had been taken from them and their parents butchered or hanged. The raiment of Marco and his wife was of coarse tow-linen and linsey-woolsey respectively, and resembled township maps, it being made up pretty exclusively of patches which had been added, township by township, in the course of five or six years, until hardly a hand’s-breadth of the original garments was surviving and present. Now I wanted to fit these people out with new suits, on account of that swell company, and I didn’t know just how to get at it—with delicacy, until at last it struck me that as I had already been liberal in inventing wordy gratitude for the king, it would be just the thing to back it up with evidence of a substantial sort; so I said:

“And Marco, there’s another thing which you must permit—out of kindness for Jones—because you wouldn’t want to offend him. He was very anxious to testify his appreciation in some way, but he is so diffident he couldn’t venture it himself, and so he begged me to buy some little things and give them to you and Dame Phyllis and let him pay for them without your ever knowing they came from him—you know how a delicate person feels about that sort of thing—and so I said I would, and we would keep mum.  Well, his idea was, a new outfit of clothes for you both—”

“Oh, it is wastefulness!  It may not be, brother, it may not be. Consider the vastness of the sum—”

“Hang the vastness of the sum!  Try to keep quiet for a moment, and see how it would seem; a body can’t get in a word edgeways, you talk so much.  You ought to cure that, Marco; it isn’t good form, you know, and it will grow on you if you don’t check it. Yes, we’ll step in here now and price this man’s stuff—and don’t forget to remember to not let on to Jones that you know he had anything to do with it.  You can’t think how curiously sensitive and proud he is.  He’s a farmer—pretty fairly well-to-do farmer—and I’m his bailiff; but—the imagination of that man!  Why, sometimes when he forgets himself and gets to blowing off, you’d think he was one of the swells of the earth; and you might listen to him a hundred years and never take him for a farmer—especially if he talked agriculture.  He thinks he’s a Sheol of a farmer; thinks he’s old Grayback from Wayback; but between you and me privately he don’t know as much about farming as he does about running a kingdom—still, whatever he talks about, you want to drop your underjaw and listen, the same as if you had never heard such incredible wisdom in all your life before, and were afraid you might die before you got enough of it.  That will please Jones.”

It tickled Marco to the marrow to hear about such an odd character; but it also prepared him for accidents; and in my experience when you travel with a king who is letting on to be something else and can’t remember it more than about half the time, you can’t take too many precautions.

This was the best store we had come across yet; it had everything in it, in small quantities, from anvils and drygoods all the way down to fish and pinchbeck jewelry.  I concluded I would bunch my whole invoice right here, and not go pricing around any more. So I got rid of Marco, by sending him off to invite the mason and the wheelwright, which left the field free to me.  For I never care to do a thing in a quiet way; it’s got to be theatrical or I don’t take any interest in it.  I showed up money enough, in a careless way, to corral the shopkeeper’s respect, and then I wrote down a list of the things I wanted, and handed it to him to see if he could read it.  He could, and was proud to show that he could. He said he had been educated by a priest, and could both read and write.  He ran it through, and remarked with satisfaction that it was a pretty heavy bill.  Well, and so it was, for a little concern like that.  I was not only providing a swell dinner, but some odds and ends of extras.  I ordered that the things be carted out and delivered at the dwelling of Marco, the son of Marco, by Saturday evening, and send me the bill at dinner-time Sunday. He said I could depend upon his promptness and exactitude, it was the rule of the house.  He also observed that he would throw in a couple of miller-guns for the Marcos gratis—that everybody was using them now.  He had a mighty opinion of that clever device.  I said:

“And please fill them up to the middle mark, too; and add that to the bill.”

He would, with pleasure.  He filled them, and I took them with me.  I couldn’t venture to tell him that the miller-gun was a little invention of my own, and that I had officially ordered that every shopkeeper in the kingdom keep them on hand and sell them at government price—which was the merest trifle, and the shopkeeper got that, not the government.  We furnished them for nothing.

The king had hardly missed us when we got back at nightfall.  He had early dropped again into his dream of a grand invasion of Gaul with the whole strength of his kingdom at his back, and the afternoon had slipped away without his ever coming to himself again.