“That cannot I,” she said. “The secret was known only to my daughter.”
“Who is thy daughter?”
“The hoary woman, she who slept with me in the cavern.”
“That aged crone thy daughter, daughter to thee so youthful and so fresh?
“Even so,” she said, “I bore her at sixteen, and slumbered for seventy years. When I awoke she was withered and decrepit: I youthful as when I closed my eyes. But she had learned the secret, which I never knew.”
“The Bonze shall be crucified!” yelled the Emperor.
“It is too late,” said she; “he is torn in pieces already.”
“By whom?”
“By the multitude that are now coming to do the like unto thee.”
And as she spoke the doors were burst open, and in rushed the people, headed by the most pious Bonze in the Empire (after the late Principal Bonze), who plunged a sword into the Emperor’s breast, exclaiming: