The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Lady, or the Tiger?, by Frank R. Stockton

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Title: The Lady, or the Tiger?

Author: Frank R. Stockton

Last updated: December 28, 2008
Posting Date: July 20, 2008 [EBook #396]
Release Date: January, 1995

Language: English

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Produced by Edward A. Malone.

THE LADY, OR THE TIGER?

by

Frank R. Stockton

In the very olden time there lived a semi-barbaric king, whose ideas,
though somewhat polished and sharpened by the progressiveness of
distant Latin neighbors, were still large, florid, and untrammeled, as
became the half of him which was barbaric. He was a man of exuberant
fancy, and, withal, of an authority so irresistible that, at his will,
he turned his varied fancies into facts. He was greatly given to
self-communing, and, when he and himself agreed upon anything, the
thing was done. When every member of his domestic and political
systems moved smoothly in its appointed course, his nature was bland
and genial; but, whenever there was a little hitch, and some of his
orbs got out of their orbits, he was blander and more genial still, for
nothing pleased him so much as to make the crooked straight and crush
down uneven places.

Among the borrowed notions by which his barbarism had become semified
was that of the public arena, in which, by exhibitions of manly and
beastly valor, the minds of his subjects were refined and cultured.

But even here the exuberant and barbaric fancy asserted itself. The
arena of the king was built, not to give the people an opportunity of
hearing the rhapsodies of dying gladiators, nor to enable them to view
the inevitable conclusion of a conflict between religious opinions and
hungry jaws, but for purposes far better adapted to widen and develop
the mental energies of the people. This vast amphitheater, with its
encircling galleries, its mysterious vaults, and its unseen passages,
was an agent of poetic justice, in which crime was punished, or virtue
rewarded, by the decrees of an impartial and incorruptible chance.

When a subject was accused of a crime of suffic