THUR AND HIS KNIGHTS.

IV.--THE FINAL TRIAL.

"Ten Knights, as before, were put by the stone to guard it until the new
trial," continued the Story-teller. "The Archbishop was not going,
through lack of care, to have it said that anything had been done to the
stone meanwhile to make it harder for the contestants to pull forth the
sword, or easier for Arthur to perform that feat."

"I'll bet those Knights practised on it, though," said Jack. "I would
have."

"It wouldn't have done any good, I imagine," said his father. "There was
something mysterious about it all, and whatever that was it worked in
favor of Arthur and against all the others."

"I don't believe all ten of 'em together could have pulled it out,"
Mollie put in. "It was one of those trick swords, like men swallow at
circuses, I guess, and I'm certain that Mr. Merlin put it there, and
showed Arthur how the trick worked. It had a spring in it, which he
could touch with his thumb to make it come out, maybe."

"Maybe so," said her father, "although I doubt it. There were lots of
queer things happening in those days that we of to-day would hardly
believe if we saw them with our own eyes--things that sound in the
telling of them quite like fairy stories."

"Like Merlin being able to tell what was going to happen next week?"
suggested Jack.

"Exactly," said the Story-teller. "If anybody claimed to be able to do
that now, we'd laugh at him."

"He'd be a great man for a newspaper," said Jack. "If a newspaper had a
man like that on it, it could tell the people in advance that such and
such an accident was going to happen at such and such a time on such and
such a railroad, and then the people wouldn't go on that road at that
time, and their lives would be saved."

"That's so," said Mollie. "And if the accident was going to happen
because a switchman was asleep, somebody could be sent ahead to wake him
up, so that the accident wouldn't happen at all."

"There is no doubt about it," said the Story-teller. "A man like Merlin
would be very useful in these days, but his kind is very much like the
leviathans and mastodons that lived before the flood. The race has died
out, and true prophets are as scarce now as huckleberries in December.
But to come back to the story, whether there was a spring in the sword
or not, Merlin was undoubtedly responsible for it, and whatever he did,
he did it in Arthur's behalf, for when Candlemas day came about again
the same thi