en he formally saluted
himself in the looking-glass. 'Excellency,' he said again, and laughed
again. Then he opened his double windows and stepped out upon the
balcony.

London was looking at its best just then, and his spirits stirred in
grateful response to the sunlight. How dismal everything would have
seemed, he was thinking, if the streets had been soaking under a leaden
sky, if the trees had been dripping dismally, if his glance directed to
the street below had rested only upon distended umbrellas glistening
like the backs of gigantic crabs! Now everything was bright, and London
looked as it can look sometimes, positively beautiful. Paulo's Hotel
stands, as everybody knows, in the pleasantest part of Knightsbridge,
facing Kensington Gardens. The sky was brilliantly blue, the trees were
deliciously green; Knightsbridge below him lay steeped in a pure gold of
sunlight. The animation of the scene cheered him sensibly. May is seldom
summery in England, but this might have been a royal day of June.

Opposite to him he could see the green-grey roofs of Kensington Palace.
At his left he could see a public-house which bore the name and stood
upon the site of the hostelry where the Pretender's friends gathered on
the morning when they expected to see Queen Anne succeeded by the heir
to the House of Stuart. Looking from the one place to the other, he
reflected upon the events of that morning when those gentlemen waited in
vain for the expected tidings, when Bolingbroke, seated in the council
chamber at yonder palace, was so harshly interrupted. It pleased the
stranger for a moment to trace a resemblance between the fallen fortunes
of the Stuart Prince and his own fallen fortunes, as dethroned Dictator
of the South American Republic of Gloria. 'London is my St. Germain's,'
he said to himself with a laugh, and he drummed the national hymn of
Gloria upon the balcony-rail with his fingers.

His gaze, wandering over the green bravery of the Park, lost itself in
the blue sky. He had forgotten London; his thoughts were with another
place under a sky of stronger blue, in the White House of a white square
in a white town. He seemed to hear the rattle of rifle shots, shrill
trumpet calls, angry party cries, the clatter of desperate charges
across the open space, the angry despair of repulses, the piteous
pageant of civil war. Knightsbridge knew nothing of all that. Danes may
have fought there, the chivalry of the White Rose or the