man to the King in the torture-chamber. King Ferdinand was not idle at
the moment, and he looked up good-temperedly enough from his employment:
but almost instantly his merry face was overcast.

"Dear me!" says Ferdinand, as he dropped his white hot pincers
sizzlingly into a jar of water, "and I had hoped you would not be
bothering me for a good ten years!"

"Now if I bother you at all it is against my will," declared Manuel,
very politely, "nor do I willingly intrude upon you here, for, without
criticizing anybody's domestic arrangements, there are one or two things
that I do not fancy the looks of in this torture-chamber."

"That is as it may be. In the mean time, what is that I see in your
pocket wrapped in red silk?"

"It is a feather, King, wrapped in a bit of my sister's best petticoat."

Then Ferdinand sighed, and he arose from his interesting experiments
with what was left of the Marquess de Henestrosa, to whom the King had
taken a sudden dislike that morning.

"Tut, tut!" said Ferdinand: "yet, after all, I have had a brave time of
it, with my enormities and my iniquities, and it is not as though there
were nothing to look back on! So at what price will you sell me that
feather?"

"But surely a feather is no use to anybody, King, for does it not seem
to you a quite ordinary feather?"