"it would not be quite the same."

The King turned round to him.

"There spoke a true Barodian," he said. "It would not be the same.
Barodians have come to expect certain qualities from their rulers, and
they would be lost without them. A new King might accustom them to
other ways, but they are used to me, and they would not like me
different. No, Chancellor, I shall abdicate. Do not wear so sad a
face for me. I am looking forward to my new life with the greatest of
joy."

The Chancellor was not looking sad for him; he was looking sad for
himself, thinking that perhaps a new King might like changes in
Chancellors equally with changes in manners or whiskers.

"But what will you do?" he asked.

"I shall be a simple subject of the new King, earning my living by my
own toil."

The Chancellor raised his eyebrows at this.

"I suppose you think," said the King haughtily, "that I have not the
intelligence to earn my own living."

The Chancellor with a cough remarked that the very distinguished
qualities which made an excellent King did not always imply the
corresponding--er--and so on.

"That shows how little you know about it. Just to give one example.
I happen to know that I have in me the makings of an excellent
swineherd."

"A swineherd?"

"The man who--er--herds the swine. It may surprise you to hear that,
posing as a swineherd, I have conversed with another of the profession
upon his own subject, without his suspecting the truth. It is just
such a busy outdoor life as I should enjoy. One herds and one milks,
and one milks, and--er--herds, and so it goes on day after day." A
happy smile, the first the Chancellor had ever seen there, spread
itself over his features. He clapped the Chancellor playfully on the
back and added, "I shall simply love it."

The Chancellor was amazed. What a story for his dinner-parties when
the war was over!

"How will you announce it?" he asked, and his tone struck a happy mean
between the tones in which you address a monarch and a pig-minder
respectively.

"That will be your duty. Now that I have shaken off the curse of
those whiskers, I am no longer a proud man, but even a swineherd would
not care for it to get about that he had been forcibly shaved while
sleeping. That this should be the last incident recorded of me in
Barodian history is unbearable. You will announce therefore that I
have been slain in fair combat, though at the dead of night, by the
King o