"But, your Majesty, this is a very terrible decision. Could not your Majesty live in retirement until your Majesty had grown your Majesty's whiskers again? Surely this is----" The King came to a stand opposite him and looked down on him gravely. "Chancellor," he said, "those whiskers which you have just seen fluttering in the breeze have been for more than forty years my curse. For more than forty years I have had to live up to those whiskers, behaving, not as my temperament, which is a kindly, indeed a genial one, bade me to behave, but as those whiskers insisted I should behave. Arrogant, hasty-tempered, over-bearing--these are the qualities which have been demanded of the owner of those whiskers. I played a part which was difficult at first; of late, it has, alas! been more easy. Yet it has never been my true nature that you have seen." He paused and looked silently at himself in the glass. "But, your Majesty," said the Chancellor eagerly, "why choose this moment to abdicate? Think how your country will welcome this new King whom you have just revealed to me. And yet," he added regretfully, "it would not be quite the same." The King turned round to him. "There spoke a true Barodian," he said. "It would not be the same. Barodians have come to expect certain qualities from their rulers, and they would be lost without them. A new King might accustom them to other ways, but they are used to me, and they would not like me different. No, Chancellor, I shall abdicate. Do not wear so sad a face for me. I am looking forward to my new life with the greatest of joy." The Chancellor was not looking sad for him; he was looking sad for himself, thinking that perhaps a new King might like changes in Chancellors equally with changes in manners or whiskers. "But what will you do?" he asked. "I shall be a simple subject of the new King, earning my living by my own toil." The Chancellor raised his eyebrows at this. "I suppose you think," said the King haughtily, "that I have not the intelligence to earn my own living." The Chancellor with a cough remarked that the very distinguished qualities which made an excellent King did not always imply the corresponding--er--and so on. "That shows how little you know about it. Just to give one example. I happen to know that I have in me the makings of an excellent swineherd." "A swineherd?" "The man who--er--herds the swine. It may surprise you to hear that, posing as a swineherd, I have conversed with another of the profession upon his own subject, without his suspecting the truth. It is just such a busy outdoor life as I should enjoy. One herds and one milks, and one milks, and--er--herds, and so it goes on day after day." A happy smile, the first the Chancellor had ever seen there, spread itself over his features. He clapped the Chancellor playfully on the back and added, "I shall simply love it." The Chancellor was amazed. What a story for his dinner-parties when the war was over!