Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) has a lot of fun with irreverence toward hermits, especially one on a 60-ft pillar: > His stand

Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) has a lot of fun with irreverence toward hermits, especially one on a 60-ft pillar: > His stand was a pillar sixty feet high, with a broad platform on the top of it. He was now doing what he had been doing every day for twenty years up there—bowing his body ceaselessly and rapidly almost to his feet. It was his way of praying. I timed him with a stop watch, and he made 1,244 revolutions in 24 minutes and 46 seconds. It seemed a pity to have all this power going to waste. It was one of the most useful motions in mechanics, the pedal movement; so I made a note in my memorandum book, purposing some day to apply a system of elastic cords to him and run a sewing machine with it. I afterward carried out that scheme, and got five years’ good service out of him; in which time he turned out upward of eighteen thousand first-rate tow-linen shirts, which was ten a day. I worked him Sundays and all; he was going, Sundays, the same as week days, and it was no use to waste the power. These shirts cost me nothing but just the mere trifle for the materials—I furnished those myself, it would not have been right to make him do that—and they sold like smoke to pilgrims at a dollar and a half apiece, which was the price of fifty cows or a blooded race horse in Arthurdom. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/86/86-h/86-h.htm#c22 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/86/86-h/86-h.htm#c22