What was my little daughter saying, with her amusing older-sister air of omniscience? “Did you know, Jimmy, that it was a king who had all this made, out of nothing at all. We’ve just had that in school. It was only a bare, sandy plain, and he had all the trees brought here, and the terraces made, and the water brought here.... It cost millions and millions.” Jimmy looked up in astonishment at the giant oak over him. “Can you carry great big trees like these around with you?” he asked. “No, gracious, no! It was ever so long ago. They’ve grown up since. They were just scrawny little saplings. They’ve got an old picture at school that shows how it was when he was alive. Awfully ugly!” “I wouldn’t have liked it then,” said Jimmy. Sally hooted at his ignorance. “My goodness, you don’t suppose you’d ever have got any chance to play here if you’d lived then. Not much! We never could have got in. They had soldiers at all the gates to keep people out.” Jimmy’s sense of the probable was outraged. There were some things too tall to be believed, even if Sally did say them. “What was it _for_, if nobody was allowed in?” “It was for the king. Everything was for the king then. And he only let in his own family and his special friends.” “I should think people would ha’ been mad to see the king hogging everything for himself,” Jimmy said vigorously. “Oh, they were used to it,” explained Sally. “They thought it had to be that way. All the learned men in those days told them that everything would go to pieces and everybody would rob and murder everybody else if they didn’t have a king and think they loved him more than anybody else.” Once more Jimmy’s sense of the probable rose up to protest, “They didn’t _love_ that old hog-it-all king!” The little twentieth-century American brain refused to credit this ridiculous and inherently impossible idea. ( ... and yet how many generations of men suffered and died to affirm that idea as the natural and inevitable foundation of society!) “Well, they thought they had to, and so they thought they did,” said Sally lucidly. “The way we love our governments now. But after a couple of hundred years or so they found out the learned men didn’t know so much, and that it wasn’t having a king that kept folks from robbing and murdering all the time. So they got together and came out here from Paris and took all this away from him. And that’s how we get in to play.” Jimmy’s fancy was tickled by a new idea. “I bet he’d be surprised if he could see us playing here.” Sally dramatized the scene, instantly. “Wouldn’t he though! Suppose he should come walking right down those marble steps with his high wig and his big-buckled shoes, and his clothes all solid gold and diamonds, and suppose he should walk right up to us and say, ‘You good-for-nothing common-people, what are you doing in MY park? I’ll have you boiled in oil at once!’”