"Well, thish-yer Smiley had a yeller one-eyed cow that didn't have no tail, only just a short stump like a bannanner, and—"
However, lacking both time and inclination, I did not wait to hear about the afflicted cow, but took my leave.
THE LADY OR THE TIGER
BY
FRANK R. STOCKTON
This is an illustration of the symmetrical plot. It challenges the constructive imagination of the reader to search the story for the evidence that will lead to a logical conclusion.
THE LADY OR THE TIGER
[Footnote: From "The Lady or the Tiger?" by Frank R. Stockton.
Copyright, 1886, by Charles Scribner's Sons. Copyright, 1914, by
Marie Louise and Frances A. Stockton.]
In the very olden time, there lived a semi-barbaric king, whose ideas, though somewhat polished and sharpened by the progressiveness of distant Latin neighbors, were still large, florid, and untrammelled, as became the half of him which was barbaric. He was a man of exuberant fancy, and, withal, of an authority so irresistible that, at his will, he turned his varied fancies into facts. He was greatly given to self-communing, and when he and himself agreed upon anything, the thing was done. When every member of his domestic and political systems moved smoothly in its appointed course, his nature was bland and genial; but whenever there was a little hitch, and some of his orbs got out of their orbits, he was blander and more genial still, for nothing pleased him so much as to make the crooked straight, and crush down uneven places.
Among the borrowed notions by which his barbarism had become semified was that of the public arena, in which, by exhibitions of manly and beastly valor, the minds of his subjects were refined and cultured.