repeating it five hundred times--that our King is a perfect
fraud.

GRANDFATHER. Why only five hundred times? There is no need to
practise such heroic self-control--you can say it five thousand
times if that adds to your pleasure.

SECOND CITIZEN. But you cannot keep up a dead lie forever.

GRANDFATHER. It has made me alive, my friend.

THIRD CITIZEN. We shall proclaim to the whole world that our
King is a lie, the merest and emptiest shadow!

FIRST CITIZEN. We shall all shout from our housetops that we
have no King--let him do whatever he likes if he exists.

GRANDFATHER. He will do nothing at all.

SECOND CITIZEN. My son died untimely at twenty-five of raging
fever in seven days. Could such a calamity befall me under the
rule of a virtuous King?

GRANDFATHER. But you still have got two sons left: while I have
lost all my five children one after another.

THIRD CITIZEN. What do you say now?

GRANDFATHER. What then? Shall I lose my King too because I have
lost my children? Don't take me for such a big fool as that.