andard of Ivor was raised and waved from palace and citadel alike.
From mountain, forest and plain, from city, village and town, its
followers flocked to swear allegiance; broken and wounded legions
staggered along the roads to join and kneel to it; women and children
followed, weeping with joy and chanting songs of praise. The Powers
held out their scepters to the lately prostrate and ignored country.
Train-loads of food and supplies of all things needed began to cross
the frontier; the aid of nations was bestowed. Samavia, at peace to
till its land, to raise its flocks, to mine its ores, would be able to
pay all back. Samavia in past centuries had been rich enough to make
great loans, and had stored such harvests as warring countries had been
glad to call upon. The story of the crowning of the King had been the
wildest of all--the multitude of ecstatic people, famished, in rags,
and many of them weak with wounds, kneeling at his feet, praying, as
their one salvation and security, that he would go attended by them to
their bombarded and broken cathedral, and at its high altar let the
crown be placed upon his head, so that even those who perhaps must die
of their past sufferings would at least have paid their poor homage to
the King Ivor who would rule their children and bring back to Samavia
her honor and her peace.

"Ivor! Ivor!" they chanted like a prayer,--"Ivor! Ivor!" in their
houses, by the roadside, in the streets.

"The story of the Coronation in the shattered Cathedral, whose roof had
been torn to fragments by bombs," said an important London paper,
"reads like a legend of the Middle Ages. But, upon the whole, there is
in Samavia's national character, something of the mediaeval, still."

Lazarus, having bought and read in his top floor room every newspaper
recording the details which had reached London, returned to report
almost verbatim, standing erect before Marco, the eyes under his shaggy
brows sometimes flaming with exultation, sometimes filled with a rush
of tears. He could not be made to sit down. His whole big body seemed
to have become rigid with magnificence. Meeting Mrs. Beedle in the
passage, he strode by her with an air so thunderous that she turned and
scuttled back to her cellar kitchen, almost falling down the stone
steps in her nervous terror. In such a mood, he was not a person to
face without something like awe.

In the middle of the night, The Rat suddenly spoke to Marco as