While the King was receiving the Prime Minister his Comptroller-General had not been idle: indeed he never was idle. He had gone straight to the Minister of the Interior and had reported to him the failure of his efforts, for it was this minister who had in the first place come to him. The steeplejack had fallen, so to speak, right into the middle of his department; and with the King's donation coming on the top the catastrophe bulked large. For, be it known, on the order of the day for the morrow's sitting of Parliament was a motion of the Labor Party, directing censure on the Government for having brought pressure to bear on contractors and caused work to be continued upon Government buildings when Labor and Capital were at war. It was nothing to Labor that the hire of the scaffolding used in the repairs was costing the country a considerable sum of money while it stood uselessly waiting about the walls of the Legislature; blacklegs had gone up on it and blacklegs had been pulled down from it; and one particular blackleg had gone up on it and had come down without any pulling whatever--an accident over which Labor was savagely ready to exult and say, "Serve him right!" And how would it be if they saw in their morning papers, on the very day when the motion was down for debate, that the King had gone out of his way to make a handsome donation to the widow? The Minister of the Interior simply could not allow it; yet now word had come to him that his Majesty persisted in his intention. So when the Prime Minister came out the Minister of the Interior went in and put his case to the King, as I have put it here to the reader--only far more persuasively, and ornately, and at very much greater length. He also added to what has already been set forth, as a point making the man a less worthy object of compassion, that according to latest accounts he had gone to his work under the influence of drink. "So do all steeplejacks," said the King, and quoted the _Encyclopedia_: "It is only when they are drunk that they can do it. _I_ know." He spoke as though he had tried it. Before the minister had done the King was really angry. "Mr. Secretary," said he, "I don't care how many strikes there are, or how many Trades Unions, or how many motions of censure from the gentlemen of the Labor Party: they may motion to censure _me_ if they like! The man is dead, and I was unfortunate enough to be a witness of his death. He died in an attempt to do a laudable action." (Here the King was tempted to quote the peroration from his favorite newspaper, but he checked himself: the minister would not have understood.) "His wife," he went on, "is now a widow, and his children are orphans; and if that twenty pounds may not go to them, then I am not master of my own purse-strings, or"--he added by way of finish--"of my own natural feelings and emotions as an ordinary human being."