Duplicate metas, near miss

His Majesty the Sultan bet me his beard that no man could count the sand in his garden. I asked for a spoon and one afternoon. At sundown I gave him a number so long it took two clerks to say it. He checked none of it, shaved at once, and wept.

London fog was so thick one morning that I cut a slice and took it home. My cook fried it with onions. It tasted of coal and old rain. We sold the rest as gray wool, and a tailor in Leeds made me a fine suit that vanished at noon.

My gray mare could read, a fact I kept from the neighbors. She liked poems and hated sums. Once she found a spelling error on a road sign and refused to pass. We stood there for two days until the king himself sent a painter with a brush and a humble note.

Spurs rang out across Moldavia when my hussars came to town. Each man was six feet tall, and each horse could do long division. We charged the enemy in perfect order, and then we stopped to correct their math. Their officers wept. They paid a fine and went home.

Ants carried off my dinner table in Ceylon.