a choice band of them in private training for some time,
and the date was now arriving for their first public
effort.

This experiment was baseball. In order to give the
thing vogue from the start, and place it out of the
reach of criticism, I chose my nines by rank, not
capacity. There wasn't a knight in either team who
wasn't a sceptered sovereign. As for material of this
sort, there was a glut of it always around Arthur.
You couldn't throw a brick in any direction and not
cripple a king. Of course, I couldn't get these people
to leave off their armor; they wouldn't do that when
they bathed. They consented to differentiate the armor
so that a body could tell one team from the other, but