I can only say that even as a kid I never believed that anyone could remember such a thing so specifically.  And react to it with such precision in a time when the whole idea of clocks was so relatively primitive.  But I can’t remember.  Did Hank have a watch and an almanac (with historical eclipse information in it) with him?

Carl

Sent from my iPhone

> On Aug 1, 2022, at 8:43 AM, Daniel P. B. Smith <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
> In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the narrator says "But all of a sudden I stumbled on the very thing, just by luck. I knew that the only total eclipse of the sun in the first half of the sixth century occurred on the 21st of June, A.D. 528, O.S., and began at 3 minutes after 12 noon.”
> 
> When I read the book as a kid, I just took this at face value; and of course Mark Twain didn’t have any problems using unlikely coincidences in his other books. 
> 
> But since then I’ve always wondered: are we really supposed to believe this? Or was Mark Twain poking deadpan fun at unbelievable coincidences in literature?