"And shave his whiskers off."
The Chancellor trembled with delight.
"Your Majesty," he said in a quavering voice, "forty years, man and boy, have I served your Majesty, and your Majesty's late lamented father, and never have I heard such a beautiful plan."
Merriwig struggled with himself for a moment, but his natural honesty was too much for him.
"It was put into my head by a remark of my Court Barber's," he said casually. "But of course the actual working out of it has been mine."
"Jewels of wisdom," said the Chancellor sententiously, "may fall from the meanest of hinds."
"I suppose," said Merriwig, taking up his tablets and absently scratching out the words written thereon, "there is nothing in the rules against it?"
"By no means, your Majesty. In the annuals of Euralia there are many instances of humour similar to that which your Majesty suggests: humour, if I may say so, which, while evidencing to the ignorant only the lighter side of war, has its roots in the most fundamental strategical considerations."
Merriwig regarded him with admiration. This was indeed a Chancellor.
"The very words," he answered, "which I said to myself when the idea came to me. 'The fact,' I said, 'that this will help us to win the war, must not disguise from us the fact that the King of Barodia will look extremely funny without his whiskers.' To-night I shall sally forth and put my plan into practice."