hat pays for a funeral.
In sending it, you might explain that I had the misfortune to be an
eye-witness."

The secretary cooed like a brooding dove. Of course everybody would
understand and appreciate. He made a memorandum of the ten pounds and
closed up his tablets.

Meanwhile the King went on thinking aloud. "I wonder," he said, "whether
they take proper precautions in a trade like that? I would like to look
it up. Find me the 'ST' volume of the _Encyclopedia Appendica_."

And when the volume was brought to him the King sat down and read all
about steeplejacks and climbing irons, and cranks, and pulleys, and all
the other various appliances requisite for the driving of that dreadful
trade; read also how the men were inclined to prime themselves for the
task in ever-increasing measure, and so one day having over-primed to be
found at the bottom instead of at the top, knowing nothing themselves of
how they got there. It was all very interesting and very apposite, and
rather pathetic; and when he had done he turned over the pages backward
till he came from steeplejacks to "Statesmen" and "Statecraft" and
"Statutes" and the affairs of State in general (it was from the
_Encyclopedia Appendica_--a presentation copy--that he got most of his
information upon practical things); and in these articles he became so
absorbed that he quite forgot how time flew, until his chief secretary
came formally to announce to him that the hour for appearing in Council
had arrived.

This announcement, be it observed, was made by no ordinary working
secretary, but by the chief of them all, the Comptroller of his
Majesty's household, a retired general who had passed from the military
to the civil service with a record brilliantly made for him by other
men--adjutants and attaches and all those indefatigable right-hand
assistants of whom your true diplomatist forms his stepping-stones to
power. General Poast and the Prime Minister shared between them the
ordering and disposal of the King's public services to the Nation, while
over other departments impenetrable to the Premier the hand of the
Comptroller was still extended. Though personally the King rather
disliked him, he had become an absolutely indispensable adjunct to the
daily life--so smooth in its workings, yet so easily dislocated--of the
Royal Household; also, as a go-between for ministers whose intercourse
with the Crown was purely formal, he had proved himself a very efficient
impl