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 phantasms.
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 of 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 crowd, he would give me a look which
said, plainly: »If that thing could be tried over again, now, with this kind of
folk, you would see a different result.« Well, when he was first sold, it
secretly tickled me to see him go for seven dollars; but before he was done with
his sweating and worrying I wished he had fetched