However, there is no occasion for my working my sympathies
up on his account. Let him go, for the present;
I took his number, so to speak.
The slave-dealer bought us both, and hitched us onto
that long chain of his, and we constituted the rear
of his procession. We took up our line of march
and passed out of Cambenet at noon; and it seemed
to me unaccountably strange and odd that the King
of England and his chief minister, marching manacled
and fettered and yoked, in a slave convoy, could move
by all manner of idle men and women, and under windows
where sat the sweet and the lovely, and yet never
attract a curious eye, never provoke a single remark.
Dear, dear, it only shows that there is nothing diviner
about a king than there is about a tramp, after all.
He is just a cheap and hollow artificiality when
you don’t know he is a king. But reveal
his quality, and dear me it takes your very breath
away to look at him. I reckon we are all fools.
Born so, no doubt.
A PITIFUL INCIDENT
It’s a world of surprises. The king brooded;
this was natural. What would he brood about,
should you say? Why, about the prodigious nature
of his fall, of course—from the loftiest
place in the world to the lowest; from the most illustrious
station in the world to the obscurest; from the grandest
vocation among men to the basest. No, I take
my oath that the thing that graveled him most, to start
with, was not this, but the price he had fetched!
He couldn’t seem to get over that seven dollars.
Well, it stunned me so, when I first found it out,
that I couldn’t believe it; it didn’t seem
natural. But as soon as my mental sight cleared
and I got a right focus on it, I saw I was mistaken;
it was natural. For this reason:
a king is a mere artificiality, and so a king’s
feelings, like the impulses of an automatic doll,
are mere artificialities; but as a man, he is a reality,
and his feelings, as a man, are real, not phantoms.
It shames the average man to be valued below his
own estimate of his worth, and the king certainly wasn’t
anything more than an average man, if he was up that
high.
Confound him, he wearied me with arguments to show
that in anything like a fair market he would have
fetched twenty-five dollars, sure—a thing
which was plainly nonsense, and full or the baldest
conceit; I wasn’t worth it myself. But
it was tender ground for me to argue on. In
fact, I had to simply shirk argument and do the diplomatic
instead. I had to throw conscience aside, and
brazenly concede that he ought to have brought twenty-five
dollars; whereas I was quite well aware that in all
the ages, the world had never seen a king that was
worth half the money, and during the next thirteen
centuries wouldn’t see one that was worth the
fourth of it. Yes, he tired me. If he
began to talk about the crops; or about the recent
weather; or about the condition of politics; or about
