His most conspicuous triumph, however, was in England. On May 6th, King Edward VII died, and President Taft appointed Colonel Roosevelt special envoy, to represent the United States at the royal funeral. This drew together crowned heads from all parts of Europe, so that at one of the State functions at Buckingham Palace there were no fewer than thirteen monarchs at table. The Colonel stayed at Dorchester House with the American Ambassador, Mr. Whitelaw Reid, and was beset by calls and invitations from the crowned personages. I have heard him give a most amusing account of that experience, but it is too soon to repeat it. Then, as always, he could tell a bore at sight, and the bore could not deceive him by any disguise of ermine cloak or Imperial title. The German Kaiser seems to have taken pains to pose as the preferred intimate of "Friend Roosevelt," but the "Friend" remained unwaveringly Democratic. One day William telephoned to ask Roosevelt to lunch with him, but the Colonel diplomatically pleaded a sore throat, and declined. At another time when the Kaiser wished him to come and chat, Roosevelt replied that he would with pleasure, but that he had only twenty minutes at the Kaiser's disposal, as he had already arranged to call on Mrs. Humphry Ward at three-thirty. These reminiscences may seem trifling, unless you take them as illustrating the truly Democratic simplicity with which the First Citizen of the American Republic met the scions of the Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns on equal terms as gentleman with gentlemen. Some of his backbiters and revilers at home whispered that his head was turned by all these pageants and courtesies of kings, and that he regretted that our system provided for no monarch. This afforded him infinite amusement. "Think of it!" he said to me after his return. "They even say that I want to be a prince myself! Not I! I've seen too many of them! Do you know what a prince is? He's a cross between Ward McAllister and Vice-President Fairbanks. How can any one suppose I should like to be that?" It may be necessary to inform the later generation that Mr. Ward McAllister was by profession a decayed gentleman in New York City who achieved fame by compiling a list of the Four Hundred persons whom he condescended to regard as belonging to New York Society. Vice-President Fairbanks was an Indiana politician, tall and thin and oppressively taciturn, who seemed to be stricken dumb by the weight of an immemorial ancestry or by the sense of his own importance; and who was not less cold than dumb, so that irreverent jokers reported that persons might freeze to death in his presence if they came too near or stayed too long.