The guards waked one by one.
“Ho here! Ho there! Has no man seen
The king?” The cry ran to and fro;
Beggar and king, they laughed, I ween,
The laugh that free men know.
On the king’s gate the moss grew gray;
The king came not. They called him dead;
And made his eldest son one day
Slave in his father’s stead.
—Copyright by Little, Brown & Co., Boston, Mass., and used by kind permission.