The Lady, or the Tiger? - Frank R. Stockton (best thriller novels of all time .TXT) 📗

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The Lady, or the Tiger?

 

by Frank R. Stockton

 

January 1995 [Etext #396]

 

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THE LADY, OR THE TIGER?

by Frank R. Stockton

 

In the very olden time there lived a semi-barbaric king, whose

ideas, though somewhat polished and sharpened by the

progressiveness of distant Latin neighbors, were still large,

florid, and untrammeled, as became the half of him which was

barbaric. He was a man of exuberant fancy, and, withal, of an

authority so irresistible that, at his will, he turned his varied

fancies into facts. He was greatly given to self-communing, and,

when he and himself agreed upon anything, the thing was done.

When every member of his domestic and political systems moved

smoothly in its appointed course, his nature was bland and genial;

but, whenever there was a little hitch, and some of his orbs got

out of their orbits, he was blander and more genial still, for

nothing pleased him so much as to make the crooked straight and

crush down uneven places.

 

Among the borrowed notions by which his barbarism had become

semified was that of the public arena, in which, by exhibitions of

manly and beastly valor,