Our entrance had been so sudden, due to the hustle to make way for the princes following close upon us, and in thought and speech we had been so far away during the trip, that the Danish greeting left me for the moment dumb, groping my way four thousand miles across the sea. Slowly and laboriously, as it seemed to me, I found the tongue of my childhood again, but awkward beyond belief. This is what it said: “How very respectable of you to ask us.” The Crown Princess looked at me a moment, uncertain what to think, then caught the look in my wife’s face, and laughed outright. At which the Prince came up and heard the explanation, and we all laughed together. The next moment the room was filled with their children, and we were introduced right and left. It was all quite as neighborly and as informal as if we had been at home. Fine young people, all of them; finest of them all Prince Karl, who is now King Haakon of Norway. Handsome, frank, and full of fun and friendliness, he was both good to look at and to speak with; and in that he resembled his father. They all have the slender, youthful shape of the old King. But for his furrowed face and the tired look that often came into it in the last few years, no one would have thought him over fifty, though he was nearly ninety. The Crown Prince at sixty-one seemed barely forty. My wife was taken in to dinner by a prince, a shy, boyish young fellow, whose great ambition, he confided to her, was to live in a New York sky-scraper and shoot up and down in the elevator, which was entirely contrary to her inclinations, and she told him so. I was not so lucky, but I shall always remember that evening with unalloyed pleasure for the hearty and unaffected hospitality of our hosts and of everybody. The Crown Prince talked of America and its people with warm appreciation, and of President Roosevelt as a chief prop of the world’s peace, at the very time when some people at home were yet shouting that he was a firebrand. He thought him a wonderful man, and we did not disagree. The thing that especially challenged his admiration was his capacity for work--for getting things done. That any one could get access to him in a nation of eighty millions, and get a hearing if he was entitled to one, seemed to him marvellous. He was interested in everything done for the toiler in our great cities, and heard with visible interest of the progress we were making in the search for the lost neighbor. The talk strayed to the unhappy conditions in Russia, the Jewish massacres, and the threatening unrest. My wife was expressing her horror at the things we read, and I began to feel that we were skating on very thin ice, seeing that the Czar was the Crown Prince’s nephew, when I heard him say to her, with great earnestness, “You may believe that if my sister had the influence many think, many a burden would be eased for that unhappy people.” And my heart swelled with gratitude; for Crown Prince Frederik’s sister, the Czar’s