with him disposed them to take a fancy to him for his own sake; and when some one had remembered that the English were supposed to be, as a nation, lovers of sport, he received so many invitations to come and hunt various animals that he might have imagined that life in Thracia was mainly devoted to the chase. The persons who in reality carried on the work of government were not the grey-haired chiefs who surrounded their new King, but the army of inferior officials to whom the Scythian newspapers were wont to refer scathingly as “briefless barristers and unsuccessful journalists.” They were western to a fault, wore their black broadcloth as though to the manner born, and it was easy to see that it was on them, and not on the titular heads of their departments, that M. Drakovics relied for the prosecution of his policy. Each of these men was directly responsible to him, for the nominal Ministers relied on him to tell them what papers they were to sign, and what orders they were to give, and he sent them as subordinates whom he chose. On these subordinates he could depend, for he had raised them from their original obscurity to the position they occupied at present, and all their interests were bound up with his, so that they were ready to cling to him through thick and thin. Perilous as such an autocracy may appear, the dangers which usually accompany an experiment of the kind had not as yet shown themselves in any great degree, probably owing to the common peril from Scythia which menaced ruler and ruled alike, while the administration of King Peter Franza had been so corrupt that the people hailed the present one as a foretaste of the millennium.