The state of this folk, of whom I saw so little, I can merely guess at. The king himself explains the situation with some art. ‘No; I no pay them,’ he once said. ‘I give them tobacco. They work for me all the same brothers.’ It is true there was a brother once in Arden! But we prefer the shorter word. They bear every servile mark,—levity like a child’s, incurable idleness, incurious content. The insolence of the cook was a trait of his own; not so his levity, which he shared with the innocent Uncle Parker. With equal unconcern both gambolled under the shadow of the gallows, and took liberties with death that might have surprised a careless student of man’s nature. I wrote of Parker that he behaved like a boy of ten: what was he else, being a slave of sixty? He had passed all his years in s
