luted and droned in a side street. Around the enchanted
boundaries of the little park street cars spat and mewed and the stilted
trains roared like tigers and lions prowling for a place to enter. And
above the trees shone the great, round, shining face of an illuminated
clock in the tower of an antique public building.

Prince Michael's shoes were wrecked far beyond the skill of the
carefullest cobbler. The ragman would have declined any negotiations
concerning his clothes. The two weeks' stubble on his face was grey
and brown and red and greenish yellow--as if it had been made up from
individual contributions from the chorus of a musical comedy. No man
existed who had money enough to wear so bad a hat as his.

Prince Michael sat on his favourite bench and smiled. It was a diverting
thought to him that he was wealthy enough to buy every one of those
close-ranged, bulky, window-lit mansions that faced him, if he chose. He
could have matched gold, equipages, jewels, art treasures, estates and
acres with any Croesus in this proud city of Manhattan, and scarcely
have entered upon the bulk of his holdings. He could have sat at table
with reigning sovereigns. The social world, the world of art, the
fellowship of the elect, adulation, imitation, the homage of the
fairest, honours from the highest, praise from the wisest, flattery,
esteem, credit, pleasure, fame--all the honey of life was waiting in the
comb in the hive of the world for Prince Michael, of the Electorate of
Valleluna, whenever he might choose to take it. But his choice was to
sit in rags and dinginess on a bench in a park. For he had tasted of
the fruit of the tree of life, and, finding it bitter in his mouth,
had stepped out of Eden for a time to seek distraction close to the
unarmoured, beating heart of the world.

These thoughts strayed dreamily through the mind of Prince Michael, as
he smiled under the stubble of his polychromatic beard. Lounging thus,
clad as the poorest of mendicants in the parks, he loved to study
humanity. He found in altruism more pleasure than his riches, his
station and all the grosser sweets of life had given him. It was his
chief solace and satisfaction to alleviate individual distress, to
confer favours upon worthy ones who had need of succour, to dazzle
unfortunates by unexpected and bewildering gifts of truly royal
magnificence, bestowed, however, with wisdom and judiciousness.

And as Prince Michael's eye rested upon the glow