consulted her secretaries, who, with dovetailing ingenuity, arranged her
hours and booked to each day--often many months in advance--the
engagements which lay ahead. Therein she showed a calmer and more
philosophic temperament than her consort. The King always knew; every
day of his life with anxious forecast he consulted his diary while
shaving, and breakfasted with its troubling details fresh upon his
recollection.

Having answered his inquiry the Queen relapsed into her correspondence,
while the King resumed his newspaper; and the moment may be regarded as
propitious for presenting the reader with a portrait of these two august
personages, since so good an opportunity may not occur again. The kind
of portrait we offer is, of course, of an up-to-date and biographical
character, and does not limit itself to those circumstances of time and
space in which the commencement of this history has landed us.

So, first, we take the King,--not as we have just found him, seated at a
table with chair turned sideways and features sharply illuminated by the
reflected lights of the journal he holds in his hands--for thus we do
not see him to advantage, and it is to advantage that we would exhibit
in its externals a character of which, before we have done with it, we
intend to grow fond. Time and space must provide us with a broader view
of him than that.

This King had been upon the throne for twenty-five years; and during
that period, like a rich wine in the wood, monarchy had mellowed within
him, permeating his system with its mild and slightly dry flavor; it had
become as it were a habit, and he carried it quite naturally, almost
unconsciously, though with just a suspicion of weight, much as a scholar
carries his learning or a workman his bag of tools.