thirteen hundred years later, and under it hundreds of free men who
could not prove that they were freemen had been sold into life-long slavery,
without the circumstance making any particular impression upon me; but the
minute the law and the auction block came into my personal experience, a thing
which had been merely improper before, became suddenly hellish. Well, that's the
way we are made.
    Yes, we were sold at auction, like swine. In a big town and an active market
we should have brought a good price; but this place was utterly 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 35

                               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