en in black gowns--their chances of
episcopal preferment flown.

With triumphant suavity the Archbishop of Ebury conducted the service,
assisted by deans, chapters, bishops, and a dozen cathedral choirs.
Something in G was being intoned; the Archbishop was in splendid voice.

He asked that the King might be saved; and, man and boy, the twelve
choirs were with him.

He asked a blessing on the Church; and his prayer was seconded.

He implored wisdom for Cabinet ministers; that, it was agreed, would add
to the national satisfaction.

"In our time, O Lord, give peace!"

Peace: the echoes of that blessed word thrilled down the vaulted aisles
of the Cathedral.

Put into another form that might mean, "After our time, the deluge." But
the better word had been chosen: "Peace."

To the King's ear it came with all the softness of a caress; he welcomed
it, for it meant much to him. And thinking of all that was now happily
past he rubbed his hands.

The watchful reporters in the press-gallery above took notes of that; to
them, whose duty that day was to interpret all things on a high and
spiritual plane, it betokened the stress of a fine emotion, and in their
grandiloquent reports of that solemn ceremony they set it down so and
published it.

Yet as a matter of fact, the King had only rubbed his hands. And, truly
interpreted, his thoughts ran thus--"Peace? Well, yes, I think that now
I have earned it! Here am I, still King of Jingalo, alive and in my
right mind. During the last few months I have abdicated--put myself off
the throne, and been blown on to it again by a bomb engineered by my own
Prime Minister; I have been arrested, I have been locked up in a police
cell, I have committed robbery, and in my own palace been robbed again.
My daughter has been in prison for ten days as a common criminal; my son
seriously assaulted by the police, and for about four months
surreptitiously engaged to the daughter of an Archbishop; while a
revolutionary and seditious book written by him as a direct attack on
the Constitution and on society has been providentially burned to the
ground--that also, probably, at the instigation of my ministers. And
though all this has been going on in their midst, making history,
bringing changes to pass or preventing them, the people of Jingalo know
nothing whatever about it. What a wonderful country is the country of
Jingalo!"

And at that happy conclusion of the whole matter the King had rubbed h