re of it. The same old one will answer;
he never stales. Eighteen years ago I was in London and I called at an
Englishman's house on a bleak and foggy and dismal December afternoon
to visit his wife and married daughter by appointment. I waited half an
hour and then they arrived, frozen. They explained that they had
been delayed by an unlooked-for circumstance: while passing in the
neighborhood of Marlborough House they saw a crowd gathering and were
told that the Prince of Wales was about to drive out, so they stopped
to get a sight of him. They had waited half an hour on the sidewalk,
freezing with the crowd, but were disappointed at last--the Prince had
changed his mind. I said, with a good deal of surprise, "Is it possible
that you two have lived in London all your lives and have never seen the
Prince of Wales?"

Apparently it was their turn to be surprised, for they exclaimed: "What
an idea! Why, we have seen him hundreds of times."

They had seem him hundreds of times, yet they had waited half an hour
in the gloom and the bitter cold, in the midst of a jam of patients from
the same asylum, on the chance of seeing him again. It was a stupefying
statement, but one is obliged to believe the English, even when they say
a thing like that. I fumbled around for a remark, and got out this one:

"I can't understand it at all. If I had never seen General Grant I doubt
if I would do that even to get a sight of him." With a slight emphasis
on the last word.

Their blank faces showed that they wondered where the parallel came in.
Then they said, blankly: "Of course not. He is only a President."

It is doubtless a fact that a prince is a permanent interest, an
interest not subject to deterioration. The general who was never
defeated, the general who never held a council of war, the only general
who ever commanded a connected battle-front twelve hundred miles long,
the smith who welded together the broken parts of a great republic and
re-established it where it is quite likely to outlast all the monarchies
present and to come, was really a person of no serious consequence to
these people. To them, with their training, my General was only a man,
after all, while their Prince was clearly much more than that--a being
of a wholly unsimilar construction and constitution, and being of no
more blood and kinship with men than are the serene eternal lights of
the firmament with the poor dull tallow candles of commerce that sputter
a