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. So I had privately concluded to touch the
treasury itself for the king's-evil. I covered six-
sevenths of the appropriation into the treasury a week
before starting from Camelot on my adventures, and
ordered that the other seventh be inflated into five-
cent nickels and delivered into the hands of the head
clerk of the King's Evil Department; a nickel to take
the place of each gold coin, you see, and do its work