late
as Christmas reigning in their summer scepters.

I am inclined also to hesitate about accepting the Bulgarian throne for
another reason--I do not care to be deposed when I want to do something
else. I have had my deposition taken several times and it did not look
like me either time.

I think that you monarchs ought to stand by each other more. If you
would form a society of free and independent monarchs there in Europe,
where you are so plenty, you could have a good time and every little
while you could raise your salaries if you worked it right.

Now you pull and haul each other all the time and keep yourselves in
hot water day and night. That's no way for a dynasty any more than any
one else. It impairs your usefulness and fills our telegraphic columns
full of names that we can not pronounce. Every little while we have to
pay the operator at this end of the cable ten dollars for writing in a
rapid, flowing hand that "meanwhile Russia will continue to disregard
the acts of the Sobranje."

Why should a great country like Russia go about trying to make trouble
with a low-priced Sobranje! I think that a closer alliance of crowned
heads, whose interests are identical, would certainly relieve the
monotony of many a long, tedious reign. If I were to accept the throne
of Bulgaria, which is not likely, so long as my good right arm can still
jerk a fluent cross-cut saw in the English tongue, I would form a
syndicate of monarchs with grips, pass-words, explanations and signals;
every scepter would have a contralto whistle in the butt end which could
be used as a sign of distress, while the other end could have a cork in
it, and then steering a tottering dynasty down through the dim vista of
crumbling centuries would not be so irksome as it now is.

As it is now, three or four allied powers ask a man to leave his
business and squat on a cold, hard throne for a mere pittance, and then
just as he begins to let his whiskers grow and learns to dodge a big
porcelain bomb those same allied powers jump on top of him all spraddled
out and ask him for his deposition. That is no way to treat an amateur
monarch who is trying to do right.

You can see that unless you stand by each other the thrones of Europe
will soon be empty, and every two-dollar a day hotel in America will
have an heir apparently to the throne for a head-waiter, with a coronet
put on his clothes with a rubber stamp and a loaded scepter up his
sleeve.

If y