he doctor shows you what they took out of you, and you feel that you
are going to live, unless you grow another vermiform appendix. We were
driven into a sort of Central park, and up to a building that was big
as a lot of exposition buildings, and the servants took us in charge and
walked us through long rooms covered with pictures as big as side show
pictures at a circus, but instead of snake charmers and snakes and wild
men of Borneo and sword swallowers, the king's pictures were about war,
and women without much clothes on from the belt up. Gosh, but some of
those pictures made you think you could hear the roar of battle and
smell gun powder, and dad acted as though he wanted to git right down on
the marble floor and dig a rifle pit big enough to git into.

They walked us around like they do when you are being initiated into a
secret society, only they didn't sing, "Here comes the Lobster," and hit
you with a dried bladder. The servants that were conducting us laffed.
I had never seen an Englishman laff before, and it was the most
interesting thing I saw in London. Most Englishmen look sorry about
something, as though some dear friend died every day, and their faces
seem to have grown that way. So when they laff it seems as though the
wrinkles would stay there, unless they treated their faces with massage.
They were laughing at dad's dislocated calf, and his scared appearance,
as though he was going to receive the thirty-second degree, and didn't
know whether they were going to throw him over a precipice or pull him
up to the roof by the hind legs. We passed a big hall clock, and it
struck just when we were near it, and of all the "Hark, from the tombs"
sounds I ever heard, that clock took the cake. Dad thought it sounded
like a death knell, and he would have welcomed the turning in of a fire
alarm as a sound that meant life everlasting, beside that doleful sound.

After we had marched about three mile heats, and passed the chairs of
the noble grand and the senior warden, and the exalted ruler, we came to
a bronze door as big as the gate to a cemetery, and the grand conductor
gave us a few instructions about how to back out fifteen feet from the
presence of the king, when we were dismissed, and then he turned us over
to a little man who was a grand chambermaid, I understood the fellow
to say. The door opened, and we went in, and dad's misplaced calf was
wobbling as though he had locomotor attacks-ye.

Well, there we