A would-be king has difficulty in finding a stray kingdom nowadays, and Harden-Hickey bothered his head not in the least over the problem of populating this god-forsaken jumble of volcanic rock and ashes. Ere long he blossomed forth most gorgeously in Paris and New York as King James I of the Principality of Trinidad. There was a royal cabinet, a Minister of Foreign Affairs, a Chancellerie, and uniforms, court costumes, and regalia designed by the king himself. Most dazzling of all the equipment was the Order of the Insignia of the Cross of Trinidad, a patent and decoration of nobility to be bestowed on those deemed worthy of the signal honor. The newspapers bombarded King James I with gibes and jeers, but he took himself with immense, even tragic seriousness, and issued a prospectus of the settlement of his kingdom, inviting an aristocracy of intellect and good breeding to comprise the ruling class, while the hard work was to be done by hired menials. He mustered on paper some kind of a list of resources of Trinidad, although he was hard put to name anything very tangible, and laid special stress on the buried treasure. It was to be dug up by the subjects and, if found, to be divided among the patriots who had bought the securities issued by the royal treasury. Surely a pirates' treasure was never before gravely offered among the assets of a kingdom, but King James had no sense of humor, and the lost treasure was as real to him as any other of his marvelous dreams. Some work was actually done at Trinidad, building material landed, a vessel chartered to run from Brazil, and a few misguided colonists recruited, when in 1895 the British Government ruthlessly knocked the Principality of Trinidad into a cocked hat and toppled over the throne of King James I. The island was wanted as a cable landing or relay station, and a naval officer raised the red ensign to proclaim annexation by reason of Halley's discovery in 1700. At this Brazil set up a protest on the ground that her Portuguese had been the original settlers. While the diplomats of these two powers were politely locking horns over the question of ownership, that unfortunate monarch, King James I of the Principality of Trinidad, Baron Harden-Hickey of the Holy Roman Empire, perceived that his realm had been pulled out from under him, so to speak. Whichever nation won the dispute it meant no comfort for him. Trinidad was no longer a derelict island and he was a king without a kingdom. He surrendered not one jot or tittle of his rights, and to his Minister of Foreign Affairs he solemnly bequeathed the succession and the claim to proprietorship. And among these rights and privileges was the royal interest in the buried treasure. Harden-Hickey, when he could no longer live a king, died as he thought befitting a gentleman, by his own hand. It seems a pity that he could not have been left alone to play at being king, and to find the pirates' gold. CHAPTER X