n outside the walls
of a jail: not that they wanted it to fall--but still, if it had to,
they dearly wished that they might be there to see. Thus, even in their
griefs, did the sporting instincts of the Jingalese people rise to the
surface and bring them a consolation which nothing else could afford.

My readers will give me credit, I trust, for not having sought to impose
on them that fear of impending doom, that apprehension of what the next
hour might bring forth, on the strength of which the Jingalese press so
sedulously ran its extra editions from day to day. I have never for a
moment pretended that the King was going to die, seeing, on the
contrary, that he was destined to make a complete recovery. But he was
not to be quite the same man again--not at least that man whom we have
seen in these pages bumping his way conscientiously through a period of
constitutional crisis. For when the six Jingalese medicos came to put
their heads together over him, they found in the back of his head a
small dislodgment of bone, rather less than the size of a florin, and
protruding almost an eighth of an inch from the surface of the skull.
Great was their speculation as to how such a thing could have come about
without their knowing it--for here, of course, was the root of the whole
mischief. This fracture, brought about perhaps by some flying fragment
of bomb, unnoticed in the excitement of the moment and afterwards
ignored, had evidently been the cause of the brain-fever; and when a
cause of this sort is discovered nothing is easier for medical science
than to put it right again.

And so, seeing that the bone was out of place, they put it back just
where it ought to be, that is to say, where it had been. And as soon as
that was done, and the right pressure once more restored to the King's
brain, then his temperature went down, his delirium abated, and his
mind, as it gradually came back to him, recovered the dull, safe, and
retiring qualities which had belonged to it a year ago; and with its old
constitutional balance restored to it, it became once more contented
with its limitations and surroundings, and made a very quiet, happy, and
peaceful convalescence. And though on his recovery the King still
remembered the events of the past months they appeared to him rather in
the light of a bad dream than as a slice of real life.

The Prime Minister came to see him on the very first day when he was
allowed to sit up and receive visit