mpagne, and under these swinging boughs, Bowler, we will return to
Nature."

It took about an hour to erect in Holland Lane the monarch's simple
repast, during which time he walked up and down and whistled, but
still with an unaffected air of gloom. He had really been done out of
a pleasure he had promised himself, and had that empty and sickened
feeling which a child has when disappointed of a pantomime. When he
and the equerry had sat down, however, and consumed a fair amount of
dry champagne, his spirits began mildly to revive.

"Things take too long in this world," he said. "I detest all this
Barkerian business about evolution and the gradual modification of
things. I wish the world had been made in six days, and knocked to
pieces again in six more. And I wish I had done it. The joke's good
enough in a broad way, sun and moon and the image of God, and all
that, but they keep it up so damnably long. Did you ever long for a
miracle, Bowler?"

"No, sir," said Bowler, who was an evolutionist, and had been
carefully brought up.

"Then I have," answered the King. "I have walked along a street with
the best cigar in the cosmos in my mouth, and more Burgundy inside me
than you ever saw in your life, and longed that the lamp-post would
turn into an elephant to save me from the hell of blank existence.
Take my word for it, my evolutionary Bowler, don't you believe people
when they tell you that people sought for a sign, and believed in
miracles because they were ignorant. They did it because they were
wise, filthily, vilely wise--too wise to eat or sleep or put on their
boots with patience. This seems delightfully like a new theory of the
origin of Christianity, which would itself be a thing of no mean
absurdity. Take some more wine."

The wind blew round them as they sat at their little table, with its
white cloth and bright wine-cups, and flung the tree-tops of Holland
Park against each other, but the sun was in that strong temper which
turns green into gold. The King pushed away his plate, lit a cigar
slowly, and went on--

"Yesterday I thought that something next door to a really entertaining
miracle might happen to me before I went to amuse the worms. To see
that red-haired maniac waving a great sword, and making speeches to
his incomparable followers, would have been a glimpse of that Land of
Youth from which the Fates shut us out. I had planned some quite
delightful things. A Congress of Knightsbridge with a tr