e):

"Your Excellency: I am commanded by the King to express to you His
Majesty's congratulations on the birthday of the President, to wish
him a successful administration and good health and long life and
to convey His Majesty's greetings to Your Excellency: and His
Majesty commands me to express the hope that you will acquaint the
President with His Majesty's good wishes."

Whereto I made just as pretty a little speech as your 'umble
sarvant could. Then we sat down, I called in Mrs. Page and my
secretary and we talked like human beings.

Having worked like the devil, upon whom, I imagine, at this
bibulous season many heavy duties fall--having thus toiled for two
months--the international docket is clean, I've got done a round of
twenty-five speeches (O Lord!) I've slept three whole nights, I've
made my dinner-calls--you see I'm feeling pretty well, in this
first period of quiet life I've yet found in this Babylon. Praise
Heaven! they go off for Christmas. Everything's shut up tight. The
streets of London are as lonely and as quiet as the road to Oyster
Bay while the Oyster is in South America. It's about as mild here
as with you in October and as damp as Sheepshead's Bay in an autumn
storm. But such people as you meet complain of the c-o-l-d--the
c-o-l-d; and they run into their heatless houses and put on extra
waistcoats and furs and throw shawls over their knees and curse
Lloyd George and enjoy themselves. They are a great people--even
without mint juleps in summer or eggnog in winter; and I like them.
The old gouty Lords curse the Americans for the decline of
drinking. And you can't live among them without laughing yourself
to death and admiring them, too. It's a fine race to be sprung
from.

All this field of international relations--you fellows regard it as
a bore. So it used to be before my entrance into the game! But it's
everlastingly interesting. Just to give him a shock, I asked the
Foreign Secretary the other day what difference it would make if
the Foreign Offices were all to go out of business and all the
Ambassadors were to be hanged. He thought a minute and said:
"Suppose war kept on in the Balkans, the Russians killed all their
Jews, Germany took Holland and sent an air-fleet over London, the
Japanese landed in Calif