reat American Republic, in 1889,
cut down the Chinese wall of protection, which so long had surrounded
their country, even trade succumbed, and England was under-sold in the
markets of the world. Then retrenchment was the cry; universal suffrage
elected a parliament which literally cut off the royal princes with a
shilling; and the Premier Bradlaugh swamped the House of Lords by the
creation of a battalion of life peers, who abolished the hereditary
House and established an elective Senate. It was easy then to call a
constitutional convention, declare the sovereign but the servant and
figure-head of the people, confiscate the royal estates and vote King
Albert a salary of L10,000 a year.

Then Russia took advantage of the great struggle between Germany and
France to seize India, and after the terrible defeat at Cyprus and the
siege of Calcutta the old King of England abdicated in favor of his
grandson George. But the people clamored for an elective President, and
it was nigh twenty years before the opening of our story that King
George had been forced to seek his only safe refuge in America.

Thus it was that Geoffrey Ripon had come to depend on poaching and the
garden stuff his old servant managed to raise in the two-acre lot
surrounding the lodge. Almost the only modern things in his room were
the guns and fishing tackle in the corners and the electric battery for
charging the cartridges; and now he was judicially informed that he must
poach no more, the mortgage had been finally foreclosed, and he looked
out of his window upon lands no longer his even in name. It is a sad
thing to be ruined, and if ever man was ruined beyond all hope, Geoffrey
Ripon, Earl of Brompton, was the man; it is hard to feel you are the
last of your race, that you are almost an outlaw in your own land--and
Ripon's king, George the Fifth, was suffered to play out his idle play
of royal state, in Boston, Massachusetts. Ripon had never been in
America. He pushed back his chair from the fire, as it gave out a heat
too great for any man to stand. He walked to the window, and stood
looking out upon the long perspective of elms, where the avenue
stretched away in the direction of Ripon House. As his eye wandered over
the broad view of park and forest, a carriage, drawn by four horses,
insolent in the splendor of its trappings, rolled toward him from the
castle. In that moment it seemed to Ripon that he felt all the
bitterness of hatred and envy tha