Last night's monthly meeting of the Military Service Institution on Governor's Island was made entertaining by Mark Twain, who read a paper, the announcement of which caused the thronging of the old museum hall. Gen. W. T. Sherman and Gen. Schofield were present. Gen. James B. Fry presided.

Mr. Clemens said that that which he was about to read was part of a still uncompleted book, of which he would give the first chapter by way of explanation, and follow it with selected fragments, "or outline the rest of it in bulk, so to speak; do as the dying cowboy admonished his spiritual adviser to do, 'just leave out the details, and heave in the bottom facts.'"

Mr. Clemens's story is the autobiography of Sir Robert Smith of Camelot, one of King Arthur's knights, formerly a manufacturer of Hartford, Conn. Robert Smith says of himself:

    I am a Yankee of the Yankees, a practical man, nearly barren of sentiment or poetry--in other words. My father was a blacksmith, my uncle was a horse doctor, and I was both. Then I went over to the great arms factory and learned my real trade--learned to make everything, guns, revolvers, cannon, boilers, engines, electric machines, anything, in short, that anybody wanted anywhere in the world. . . . I became head boss and had a thousand men under me. Well, a man like that is full of fight--that goes without saying. With a thousand rough men under one, one has plenty of that sort of amusement.
    Well, at last I met my match; I got my dose. It was during a misunderstanding conducted with iron crowbars with a fellow we used to call Hercules. He laid me out with a crusher alongside the head that made everything crack and seemed to make every joint of my skull lap over on its neighbor, and then the world went out in darkness and I felt nothing more, knew nothing more for a while, and when I came to again I was standing under an oak tree and the factory was gone.
    Standing under an oak tree on the grass with a beautiful broad country, a landscape spread out before me--all to myself. No, not quite, not entirely to myself. There was a fellow on a horse looking down at me--a fellow fresh out of a picture book. He was in old-time armor from his head to his heel. He had a helmet on like a cheese box with slits in it, and he carried a shield and a sword and a prodigious spear. And his horse had armor on, too, and gorgeous silken trappings, red and green, that hung around him like a bedgown to the ground. And this apparition said to me:
    "Fair sir! Will you joust?"
    Said I, "Will I which?"
    "Will you joust? Will you break a lance for land or lady?"
    Said I, "What are you giving me? You go along back to your circus, or I'll report you."
    Now what does this fellow do but fall back a couple of hundred yards and then come tilting at me, as hard as he could drive, his cheese box down close and his long spear pointed straight at me. I saw he meant business, so I was up the tree when he arrived. Well, he allowed I was his property; the captive of his spear. Well, there was argument on his side and the bulk of the advantage, so I judged it best to humor him, and we fixed up an agreement. I was to go along with him, and he wasn't to hurt me. So I came down, and we started away, I walking by the side of his horse, and we marched comfortably along through glades and over brooks that I could not remember to have seen before. It puzzled me ever so much, and yet we didn't come to any circus, or any sign of a circus, so I gave up the idea of a circus, and concluded he was from an asylum. But we never came to any asylum, so I was up a stump, as you may say.

Then another, a lad, came to him saying that he was a page. "'Oh! go along,' I said; 'you ain't more than a paragraph.'" The page happened to mention that he was born in the beginning of the year 513.

It made the cold chills creep over me. I stopped and said, a little faintly, "Now, maybe I didn't hear you just right. Would you say that again, and say it slow. What year did you say it was?" "513."
    "And, according to your notions, according to your lights and superstitions, what year is it now?" "Why," he said, "the year 528, the 19th of June." Well, I felt a mournful sinking of the heart, and muttered: "I shall never see my friends again--never see my friends any more: they won't be born for as much as a thousand years."

I made up my mind to two things. If it was still the nineteenth century and I was among lunatics and couldn't get away I would boss that asylum or know the reason why, and if, on the other hand, it was really the sixth century, all right. I didn't want any better thing; I'd boss the whole country inside of three months, for I judged I'd have the start on the best educated man in the kingdom by 1,300 years. . . . But I'm not a man to waste time, so I said to the boy, "Clarence, if your name should happen to be Clarence, what's the name of that duck, that galoot, who brought me here?'"

    There didn't seem to be brains enough in the entire nursery to bait a fishhook, but you didn't mind that after a little while, for you saw that brains were not needed in a society like that, and would have marred its symmetry and spoiled it.

    Well, of all the d----d contracts, this is boss! I offered to sublet it to Sir Launcelot, to let him have it at ninety days, with no margin, but "No," he had got a better thing. He was going for a menagerie of one-eyed giants and a college of princesses.

He took a contract from King Arthur to kill off, at one of the great tournaments, fifteen kings and many acres of hostile armored knights. When, lance in rest they charged by squadrons upon him, he behind the protection of a barbed wire fence charged with electricity mowed them down with Gatling guns that he had made for the occasion. He found that the "education of the nineteenth century is plenty good enough capital to go into business in the sixth century with," and the next year he was running the kingdom all by himself on a moderate royalty of forty per cent.

He spoiled the ogre business; cleared out the fuss and flummery of romance and put King Arthur's kingdom on a strictly business basis. Inside of three and a half years the improvement was complete. Cast-iron clothes had gone out of fashion. Sir Launcelot was running a kind of Louisiana lottery. The search for the Holy Grail had been given up for a hunt for the Northwest Passage. King Arthur's 140 illustrious Knights had turned themselves into a stock Board, and a seat at the Round Table was worth $30,000.