There was a special reason for Richard’s having his picture resemble pictures of the Adoration of the Magi for the Day of the Kings, January 6, was not only his own birthday, but also the day upon which he was crowned. And an account of his coronation tells us that after the ceremony he made an offering at the Shrine of Our Lady at Pewe, nearby, of “eleven angels,” one for each year of his young life. Exactly what these eleven angels were no one now knows; they may have been gold coins with an angel stamped upon them, or they may have been small images. But perhaps he remembered his eleven years and this offering when he told the painter to surround Mother Mary with the eleven angels in sapphire blue whom you see in the picture. One sees at least that they are _his_ angels, for each wears his special badge, the Jewel of the White Hart, and the Collar of Broom-pods. Almost all the Magi pictures represent one of the kings as kneeling, with the two others standing behind him, and one can imagine Richard boyishly choosing the other two kings. He was crowned in Westminster Abbey, so it is natural enough that one of them should be Edward the Confessor who founded the Abbey; the other, holding an arrow, is St. Edmund, an early king of England who is said to have been shot to death with arrows by the Danes, because he refused to abandon Christianity. Joseph, too, is a customary figure in paintings of the Adoration, but cannot you hear the boy king saying, “No, I do not want St. Joseph; my father died in midsummer so I really became king about the time of St. John’s Day, if I _am_ crowned at Epiphany; so I will have St. John with a lamb and Edward the Confessor; and Edward shall hold a ring?” There is a pretty story that St. John the Evangelist, wandering in the disguise of a beggar, asked alms of King Edward the Confessor; and, that the king, rather than refuse a poor man, gave him a ring from his finger, because he had no money with him. And it would be so like a boy not to care that the two St. Johns were not at all the same. That which mattered is that one of the angels was holding toward the Holy Child’s reaching hands the banner of England as the gift of the kneeling boy. [Illustration: Decoration] The Children’s Own Saint