eaty, and
myself in the chair, and perhaps a Roman triumph, with jolly old
Barker led in chains. And now these wretched prigs have gone and
stamped out the exquisite Mr. Wayne altogether, and I suppose they
will put him in a private asylum somewhere in their damned humane way.
Think of the treasures daily poured out to his unappreciative keeper!
I wonder whether they would let me be his keeper. But life is a vale.
Never forget at any moment of your existence to regard it in the light
of a vale. This graceful habit, if not acquired in youth--"

The King stopped, with his cigar lifted, for there had slid into his
eyes the startled look of a man listening. He did not move for a few
moments; then he turned his head sharply towards the high, thin, and
lath-like paling which fenced certain long gardens and similar spaces
from the lane. From behind it there was coming a curious scrambling
and scraping noise, as of a desperate thing imprisoned in this box of
thin wood. The King threw away his cigar, and jumped on to the table.
From this position he saw a pair of hands hanging with a hungry clutch
on the top of the fence. Then the hands quivered with a convulsive
effort, and a head shot up between them--the head of one of the
Bayswater Town Council, his eyes and whiskers wild with fear. He swung
himself over, and fell on the other side on his face, and groaned
openly and without ceasing. The next moment the thin, taut wood of the
fence was struck as by a bullet, so that it reverberated like a drum,
and over it came tearing and cursing, with torn clothes and broken
nails and bleeding faces, twenty men at one rush. The King sprang five
feet clear off the table on to the ground. The moment after the table
was flung over, sending bottles and glasses flying, and the _debris_
was literally swept along the ground by that stream of men pouring
past, and Bowler was borne along with them, as the King said in his
famous newspaper article, "like a captured bride." The great fence
swung and split under the load of climbers that still scaled and
cleared it. Tremendous gaps were torn in it by this living artillery;
and through them the King could see more and more frantic faces, as in
a dream, and more and more men running. They were as miscellaneous as
if some one had taken the lid off a human dustbin. Some were
untouched, some were slashed and battered and bloody, some were
splendidly dressed, some tattered and half naked, some were in the