"Oh, I forgot him," said Susie; "and I wouldn't say that King Edward was a bad man exactly, though he is a good king; but he isn't what you would call prime, is he?"
"Oh no, my dear, not prime," said nurse.
"And Charles the Second wasn't prime either," said Susie.
"I don't know about him, my dear," said nurse. "But to go back to King Henry. I always felt very much for poor Annie Bullen. A monster of iniquity I call him, dressed up in his ermine and fallals, and not a policeman or a judge daring to say him nay."
"How nice it is that common gentlemen don't behave like kings!" said Amy. "If I was a queen, I would throw my crown away when it was time for my beheadal."
"No, you'd cry," said Dick solemnly.
"I wouldn't," said Susie. "I'd march proudly out with my lovely hair floating in the wind, and my swannish neck rising out of a black velvet dress, and I'd stand on the block and say, 'I will my limbs—that means my legs and arms—to the four quarters of the country, and my heart to the tyrant who broke it.'"
"Much he'd want it," said Tom disdainfully.
But Susie stood declaiming on the sand-hill, inspired by her own eloquence, and gazed at with admiration by Amy for a courage she could not match.
"O Susie, how brave you are!" she said. "They'd have to kill you to get at it; you couldn't get at your heart till you were dead. I don't believe I could ever be as brave as that. I know I should cry."