The watchful reporters in the press-gallery above took notes of that; to them, whose duty that day was to interpret all things on a high and spiritual plane, it betokened the stress of a fine emotion, and in their grandiloquent reports of that solemn ceremony they set it down so and published it. Yet as a matter of fact, the King had only rubbed his hands. And, truly interpreted, his thoughts ran thus--"Peace? Well, yes, I think that now I have earned it! Here am I, still King of Jingalo, alive and in my right mind. During the last few months I have abdicated--put myself off the throne, and been blown on to it again by a bomb engineered by my own Prime Minister; I have been arrested, I have been locked up in a police cell, I have committed robbery, and in my own palace been robbed again. My daughter has been in prison for ten days as a common criminal; my son seriously assaulted by the police, and for about four months surreptitiously engaged to the daughter of an Archbishop; while a revolutionary and seditious book written by him as a direct attack on the Constitution and on society has been providentially burned to the ground--that also, probably, at the instigation of my ministers. And though all this has been going on in their midst, making history, bringing changes to pass or preventing them, the people of Jingalo know nothing whatever about it. What a wonderful country is the country of Jingalo!" And at that happy conclusion of the whole matter the King had rubbed his hands. THE END End of Project Gutenberg's King John of Jingalo, by Laurence Housman