There was a very good lay-out for the king's-evil business--very
tidy and creditable. The king sat under a canopy of state; about
him were clustered a large body of the clergy in full canonicals.
Conspicuous, both for location and personal outfit, stood Marinel,
a hermit of the quack-doctor species, to introduce the sick. All
abroad over the spacious floor, and clear down to the doors,
in a thick jumble, lay or sat the scrofulous, under a strong light.
It was as good as a tableau; in fact, it had all the look of being
gotten up for that, though it wasn't. There were eight hundred
sick people present. The work was slow; it lacked the interest
of novelty for me, because I had seen the ceremonies before;
the thing soon became tedious, but the proprieties required me
to stick it out. The doctor was there for the reason that in all
such crowds there were many people who only imagined something
was the matter with them, and many who were consciously sound
but wanted the immortal honor of fleshly contact with a king, and
yet others who pretended to illness in order to get the piece of
coin that went with the touch. Up to this time this coin had been
a wee little gold piece worth about a third of a dollar. When you
consider how much that amount of money would buy, in that age
and country, and how usual it was to be scrofulous, when not dead,
you would understand that the annual king's-evil appropriation was
just the River and Harbor bill of that government for the grip it
took on the treasury and the chance it afforded for skinning the
surplus.
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