Welcome back, everyone to one thousand one classic short stories and tales. This is your host and storyteller, John Haggardorn. Now, I know you've all heard of

Romeo and Juliet. Well, this is a sort of a Romeo and Juliet story by Edgar Allan Poe,

and it's called Hop Frog and Tripetta. And we must add, as a disclaimer at this point, that we do not

carry any animosity toward dwarfs or little people

or crippled dwarfs or cripple little people. We only carry animosity to older kings who felt

that making fun of people like that was okay to do. And now, Hop Frog and Tripetta by Edgar Allan Poe.

I never knew anyone so keenly alive to a joke as the king was.

He seemed to live only for joking.

To tell a good story of the joke kind, and to tell it well, was the surest road to his favor.

Thus it happened that his seven ministers were all noted for their accomplishments as jokers.

They all took after the king, too, in being large, corpulent, oily men, as well as inimitable

jokers.

Whether people grow fat by joking, or whether there is something in fat itself which predisposes

to a joke, I have never been quite able to determine, but certain it is that a lean

joker is a rare avis in terrace.

About the refinements, or as he called him, the ghost of wit,

the king troubled himself very little. He had in a special admiration for breadth in a jest,

and would often put up with length, just for the sake of it. Over niceties wearied him. He would

have preferred Rabelais' gargantua to the Zadig of Voltaire,

and, upon the whole, practical jokes suited his taste far better than verbal ones.

At the date of my narrative, professing gestures had not altogether gone out of fashion at court.

Several of the great continental powers still retained their fools,

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