 
in the very olden time, there lived a semibarbaric king who was a man of 
exuberant fancy and 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 everything moved smoothly, his nature was bland and genial; but 
whenever there was a little hitch, 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 his borrowed notions was that of the public arena, in which, by 
exhibitions of manly and beastly valor, the minds of his subjects were refined 
and cultured. 
but even here the exuberant and barbaric fancy asserted itself. 
this vast amphitheater, with its encircling galleries, its mysterious 
vault, and its unseen passages, was an agent of poetic justice, in which crime 
was punished, or virtue rewarded, by the decrees of an impartial and 
incorruptible chance. 
when a subject was accused of a crime of sufficient importance to interest 
the king, public notice was given that on an appointed day the fate of the 
accused person would be decided in the king's arena. 
when all the people had assembled in the galleries, and the king, 
surrounded by his court, sat high up on his throne of royal state on one side 
of the arena, he gave a signal, a door beneath him opened, and the accused 
subject stepped out into the amphitheater. 
