 a hundred. The thing never got
a chance to die, for every day, at one place or another, possible purchasers
looked us over, and as often as any other way, their comment on the king was
something like this:
    »Here's a two-dollar-and-a-half chump with a thirty-dollar style. Pity but
style was marketable.«
    At last this sort of remark produced an evil result. Our owner was a
practical person and he perceived that this defect must be mended if he hoped to
find a purchaser for the king. So he went to work to take the style out of his
sacred majesty. I could have given the man some valuable advice but I didn't;
you mustn't volunteer advice to a slave-driver unless you want to damage the
cause you are arguing for. I had found it a sufficiently difficult job to reduce
the king's style to a peasant's style, even when he was a willing and anxious
pupil; now then, to undertake to reduce the king's style to a slave's style -
and by force - go to! it was a stately contract. Never mind the details - it
will save me trouble to let you imagine them. I will only remark that at the end
of a week there was plenty of evidence that lash and club and fist had done
their work well; the king's body was a sight to see - and to weep over; but his
spirit? - why, it wasn't even fazed. Even that dull clod of a slave-driver was
able to see that there can be such a thing as a slave who will remain a man till
he dies; whose bones you can break, but whose manhood you can't. This man found
that from his first effort down to his latest, he couldn't ever come within
reach of the king but the king was ready to plunge for him, and did it. So he
gave up, at last, and left the king in possession of his style unimpaired. The
fact is, the king was a good deal more than a king, he was a man; and when a man
is a man, you can't knock it out of him.
    We had a rough time for a month, tramping to and fro in the earth, and
suffering. And what Englishman was the most interested in the slavery question
by that time? His grace the king! Yes; from being the most indifferent, he was
become the most interested. He
