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, the minds of his subjects were refined
and cultured.

But even here the exuberant and barbaric fancy asserted itself
The arena of the king was built, not to give the people an
opportunity of hearing the rhapsodies of dying gladiators, nor to
enable them to view the inevitable conclusion of a conflict