CHAPTER X.
BEGINNINGS OF CIVILIZATION The Round Table soon heard of the challenge, and of course it was a good deal discussed, for such things interested the boys.
The king thought I ought now to set forth in quest of adventures, so that I might gain renown and be the more worthy to meet Sir Sagramor when the several years should have rolled away.
I excused myself for the present; I said it would take me three or four years yet to get things well fixed up and going smoothly; then I should be ready; all the chances were that at the end of that time Sir Sagramor would still be out grailing, so no valuable time would be lost by the postponement; I should then have been in office six or seven years, and I believed my system and machinery would be so well developed that I could take a holiday without its working any harm.
I was pretty well satisfied with what I had already accomplished.
In various quiet nooks and corners I had the beginnings of all sorts of industries under way--nuclei of future vast factories, the iron and steel missionaries of my future civilization.

In these were gathered together the brightest young minds I could find, and I kept agents out raking the country for more, all the time.
I was training a crowd of ignorant folk into experts--experts in every sort of handiwork and scientific calling.

These nurseries of mine went smoothly and privately along undisturbed in their obscure country retreats, for nobody was allowed to come into their precincts without a special permit--for I was afraid of the Church.
I had started a teacher-factory and a lot of Sunday-schools the first thing; as a result, I now had an admirable system of graded schools in full blast in those places, and also a complete variety of Protestant congregations all in a prosperous and growing condition.

Everybody could be any kind of a Christian he wanted to; there was perfect freedom in that matter.

But I confined public religious teaching to the churches and the Sunday-schools, permitting nothing of it in my other educational buildings.