“How do you dare to stand beside the Emperor, you peasant,” said the Lord Marshal. “Go back to your plow!”
“Say that I am standing beside my plow,” whispered the peasant. He was really standing beside the Emperor, and the plow was thirty feet away.
“Do you not see,” said the Emperor, “that he is standing beside the plow?”
“Oh, yes,” said one, “he is holding the plow with one hand.”
“Yes, yes,” said another, “he is surely driving his oxen.”
“Ask them,” whispered the peasant, “if they ever saw such white oxen.”
Now the peasant’s oxen were coal black, without a single white spot on them.
“Have you ever seen such beautiful white oxen?” said the Emperor, pointing to the black ones.