Of the splendid courtiers and servitors surrounding Fumbo’s father only three remained, for I regret to say that neither the servants nor the old nobility had been able to stand the hardships attendant upon poverty, and they had left in a body the first morning Mrs Sew-and-Sew had served oatmeal without cream for breakfast. The army, too, had deserted and marched off to Jinxland because the King could not buy them new uniforms, so that only three retainers were left in the old red castle on hill. Pudge, the oldest and fattest of the wise men, had stayed because he was fond of his room in the tower and of Mrs Sew-and-Sew’s coffee. Scroggles, the second footman, had stayed because he had old-fashioned notions of his duty, and Grampa, though long since discharged from active service, had stuck to his post like the gallant old soldier he was, and as there were no battles to fight, he tended the furnace, weeded the gardens and helped King Fumbo and Mrs Sew-and-Sew bring up their son to as fine a young Prince as any in Oz. It was of Prince Tatters—during all this bluster—that Grampa was thinking as he lay shivering under the carpet, and as soon as the thunder stopped hammering in his ears he stuck out his head. The wind, after snatching off ten roofs, the wings from the red mill and shaking all the little cottages till their very chimneys chattered, had rushed away over Red Mountain. It was still raining, but Grampa, seeing that the worst was over, crawled out of the carpet and began to look for trouble. And what do you s’pose he found? Why, the King, or at least, the best part of the King! “Ragamercy!” shrieked the old soldier, jumping behind a tapis tree, a thing he had never done in all of those nine hundred and eighty battles. But his conduct does not surprise me at all, for Fumbo had lost his head in the storm, and was running wildly around without it—stumbling over bushes and vines and stamping his stockinged feet in a perfect frenzy of fright and fury. Now, of course, you will say at once that Fumbo is not first King to lose his head and I can only answer that he is the first I ever heard of who went on living without it, and if Ragbad were not in the wonderful Land of Oz I should say at once that the thing was impossible. In Oz, however, one may come apart, but no one ever dies; so here was poor Fumbo, with his head clean off, as live and lively as ever.