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 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 dogs, or cats, or morals, or theology--no matter what
--I sighed, for I knew what was coming; he was going to get out of it
a palliation of that tiresome seven-dollar sale. Wherever we
halted where there was a c