PRINCE PRIGIO, 81

 

position, because I cannot break my promise.
But your base and malevolent nature is even
more conspicuously manifest in your selfish
success than in your previous dastardly con-
tempt of duty. Why, confound you!” cried
the king, dropping the high style in which he
had.been speaking, and becoming the father,
not the monarch,—‘‘why, if you could kill the
Firedrake, did you let your poor little brothers
go and be b—b—b—broiled? Eh! what do you
say, you sneak? ‘You didn’t believe there
were any Firedrakes?’ That just comes of
your eternal conceit and arrogance! If you
were clever enough to kill the creature—and I
admit that—you were clever enough to know
that. what everybody said must be true. ‘You
have not generally found it so?’ Well, you have
this time, and let it be a lesson ‘to you; not
that there is much comfort in that, for it is not
likely you will ever have such another chance”
—exactly the idea that had occurred to Benson.
’ Here the king wept, among the tears of the
lord chief justice, the poet laureate (who had
been awfully frightened when he heard of the
rattlesnakes), the maids of honour, the chaplain
royal, and everyone but Colonel McDougal,
a Scottish soldier of fortune, who maintained
a: military reserve.

When his majesty had recovered, he said to
Prigio (who had not been crying, he was too
much absorbed) :