A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, by Mark Twain.

MARK TWAIN
whereas, on the contrary, thousands of the lame ant
the sick came and prayed before it every year and
went away whole and sound; and even the well could
look upon it and live. Of course, when I was told
these things I did not believe them; but when I went
there and saw them I had to succumb. I saw the
cures effected myself; and they were real cures and
not questionable. I saw cripples whom I had seen
around Camelot for years on crutches, arrive and
pray before that picture, and put down their crutches
and walk off without a limp. There were piles of
crutches there which had been left by such people as
a testimony.
In other places people operated on a patient's
mind, without saying a word to him, and cured him.
In others, experts assembled patients in a room and
prayed over them, and appealed to their faith, and
those patients went away cured. Wherever you find
a king who can't cure the king's-evil you can be sure
that the most valuable superstition that supports his
throne-the subject's belief in the divine appointment of his sovereign-has passed away. In my
youth the monarchs of England had ceased to touch
for the evil, but there was no occasion for this diffidence: they could have cured it forty-nine times in
fifty.
Well, when the priest had been droning for three
hours, and the good king polishing the evidences, and
the sick were still pressing forward as plenty as ever,
I got to feeling intolerably bored. I was sitting by
an open window not far from the canopy of state.
For the five hundredth time a patient stood forward
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