Again in Chapter 35, we are given Twain's double focus. Even though Twain says that only clothes can determine royalty from nobility, yet The Boss is constantly impressed with the spirit and bearing of the king because no amount of slavery or abuse can break his royal spirit.
Even though there is the implication that The Boss could arrange for their freedom, he deliberately chooses to keep the king in slavery until the king realizes the horrors of slavery; then, hopefully, he will, of his own accord, want to abolish it. In addition, even though The Boss is indignant and horrified by the various injustices that he has encountered so far, King Arthur has shown no particular concern for the various injustices and cruelties that they have encountered, and it is not until they are both made slaves that King Arthur personally feels the marks of injustice and vows to abolish at least that social crime from his realm.
Chapter 35 also shows Twain's penchant to sink suddenly into the most maudlin bathos. In this chapter, for example, we witness the burning of a woman at the stake during a snowstorm with her two daughters clinging to her and slaves being forced to gather around her to absorb the warmth from her burning body in order to keep from perishing of the bitter cold; in addition, Twain includes a scene in which a young nursing mother is hanged for stealing a small bit of cloth. The late nineteenth-century reading public, one should remember, was the same public that adored attending melodramas at the theater, but today when we make fun of the typical nineteenth-century "mellerdrammer," we also find such scenes as the above to be almost embarrassingly sentimental. More important, however, in these events, we are not told how the king responds to them, or if they have any effect at all upon him.
