e a schoolboy. Having eaten his breakfast hurriedly, but with an
appetite, he summoned one of the highest officials of the Palace, and
presented him with a shilling. "Go and buy me," he said, "a shilling
paint-box, which you will get, unless the mists of time mislead me, in
a shop at the corner of the second and dirtier street that leads out
of Rochester Row. I have already requested the Master of the
Buckhounds to provide me with cardboard. It seemed to me (I know not
why) that it fell within his department."

The King was happy all that morning with his cardboard and his
paint-box. He was engaged in designing the uniforms and coats-of-arms
for the various municipalities of London. They gave him deep and no
inconsiderable thought. He felt the responsibility.

"I cannot think," he said, "why people should think the names of
places in the country more poetical than those in London. Shallow
romanticists go away in trains and stop in places called
Hugmy-in-the-Hole, or Bumps-on-the-Puddle. And all the time they
could, if they liked, go and live at a place with the dim, divine name
of St. John's Wood. I have never been to St. John's Wood. I dare not.
I should be afraid of the innumerable night of fir trees, afraid to
come upon a blood-red cup and the beating of the wings of the Eagle.
But all these things can be imagined by remaining reverently in the
Harrow train."

And he thoughtfully retouched his design for the head-dress of the
halberdier of St. John's Wood, a design in black and red, compounded
of a pine tree and the plumage of an eagle. Then he turned to another
card. "Let us think of milder matters," he said. "Lavender Hill! Could
any of your glebes and combes and all the rest of it produce so
fragrant an idea? Think of a mountain of lavender lifting itself in
purple poignancy into the silver skies and filling men's nostrils with
a new breath of life--a purple hill of incense. It is true that upon
my few excursions of discovery on a halfpenny tram I have failed to
hit the precise spot. But it must be there; some poet called it by
its name. There is at least warrant enough for the solemn purple
plumes (following the botanical formation of lavender) which I have
required people to wear in the neighbourhood of Clapham Junction. It
is so everywhere, after all. I have never been actually to
Southfields, but I suppose a scheme of lemons and olives represent
their austral instincts. I have never visited Parson's Green,