[Illustration: Ferdinand allows the peasants to kiss his hand.] Of course it is not possible to speak with any confidence of the manner of a man so entirely artificial as Ferdinand. He has a separate manner for every occasion and for every person with whom he comes into contact. As we have seen, his manner to the Sofiotes is ever one of aloof and portentous gravity. This pose of the monarch absorbed in the affairs of State is not an original one. It is copied from the Kaiser, who has for many years taken the utmost pains to avoid smiling in public. Not long ago a photographer, to whom the Kaiser was posing, startled him into a smile by the imperious manner of his instructions. All the prints made and the negative itself had to be destroyed. The same pose of a man immersed in matters of superhuman importance has suited Ferdinand very well in Sofia, and I have shown that it has served very well to impress the people of that city. But when he was under a cloud, and forced to remain entirely at his country palaces, one found him doing the heavy benevolent father of his people, with the unfortunate Bulgarian peasants as his victims. The two palaces between which he divided his time were that of Vrana, a suburb of Sofia where he has an estate at the foot of Mount Vitosch, and Euxinograd, the “Sandringham” he maintains on the border of the Black Sea, which was recently shelled with good effect by the Russian fleet. Here you might have seen Ferdinand, gotten up in a shooting suit, with gaiters, thick leather gloves and a heavy stick, walking about the farms of the peasants and prodding the cattle in the ribs with a knowing air. Nice clean old peasant women were kept always at hand, to kiss his finger graciously extended to them, and to impress any foreign visitor with the urbanity of this monarch, and the good terms on which he existed with the simple country folk. Let me quote his English biographer:— “For the country people the King was a gentleman farmer, knowing everything about agriculture, tobacco-growing, wine-growing, the state of the markets, and most pleasant to gossip with. Every village on the railway line or country road along which the King was coming would turn out its crowd of people to salute him. In an automobile journey he would stop to watch or chat with labourers at work in the fields, or at some hamlet where the teacher took care to have his young folk lined up in front of their seniors. A pathetic love for childhood is one of the distinctive traits of Czar Ferdinand’s character.”