He did the best he could, but I've seen better.
If you have ever seen an active, heedless, enterprising child going diligently out of one mischief and into another all day long, and an anxious mother at its heels all the while, and just saving it by a hair from drowning itself or breaking its neck with each new experiment, you've seen the king and me.
If I could have foreseen what the thing was going to be like, I should have said, No, if anybody wants to make his living exhibiting a king as a peasant, let him take the layout; I can do better with a menagerie, and last longer.

And yet, during the first three days I never allowed him to enter a hut or other dwelling.

If he could pass muster anywhere during his early novitiate it would be in small inns and on the road; so to these places we confined ourselves.

Yes, he certainly did the best he could, but what of that?
He didn't improve a bit that I could see.
He was always frightening me, always breaking out with fresh astonishers, in new and unexpected places.

Toward evening on the second day, what does he do but blandly fetch out a dirk from inside his robe! "Great guns, my liege, where did you get that ?" "From a smuggler at the inn, yester eve." "What in the world possessed you to buy it ?" "We have escaped divers dangers by wit--thy wit--but I have bethought me that it were but prudence if I bore a weapon, too.
Thine might fail thee in some pinch." "But people of our condition are not allowed to carry arms.