ly stagnant and so we sold at a figure which makes me
ashamed, every time I think of it. The King of England brought
seven dollars, and his prime minister nine; whereas the king was
easily worth twelve dollars and I as easily worth fifteen. But
that is the way things always go; if you force a sale on a dull
market, I don't care what the property is, you are going to make
a poor business of it, and you can make up your mind to it. If
the earl had had wit enough to--

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.

CHAPTER XXXV

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 averag