smiled enchantingly), Bertelius was all afire about the young poet Erdreich. He had never hoped to see him; and now, if he was game, here was the chance.

"You shall see Erdreich, both of you,' said the queen. 'It will be safest. If you stayed here you would have to lie in hiding, and that's not-' She stopped and smiled, but the princess knew she meant not royal nor possible, and blushed a little because her adventure had perhaps proven her too bold. You shall go at once to Erdreich' said the queen. 'His grandmother will be good to you.'

"But-' said the princess. She looked most imploring. Queen Ismia understood. What the princess had really come for was not any wholesale adventure, not to let Bertelius meet the young poet, but to see the prince. Adventure, indeed, the adventure of meeting the prince, from the wings as you might say, while he was neither throwing over her the irised glamour of the spring pigeon nor carolling serenades. At this the queen kissed her. She smiled, too, and the princess blushed. 'Listen to me,' said the queen. 'We are going to-morrow at latest to pay our respects to Erdreich and his grandmother. You can be the little maid about the cottage. You can see and not be looked at, not be spoken to. Will that please you?'

"But my father!' said the princess. Her eyes now were full of light and courage.

"Would our good King of Telluria be likely to concern himself with kitchen wenches in cottages?' said the queen. 'No, child, he won't look at you.'

"So they kissed fervently like women in the armed truce of conspiracy, and the princess and old Bertelius set off, something to his disgust, on foot and the lady in borrowed clothes, for the poet's valley.

"Now that night it was apparent that something was happening in Arcady, a thing that never happened before. The king had come as his own envoy. He wanted to talk it over, this business of privilege and land jobbings and the like, and he and the prince and Queen Ismia sat together on the terrace and looked at the moon. Enough to set you crazy, the moon of Arcady is. There are a great many lovers there. And the prince fixed his eyes on the black line of the Tellurian mountains over in the east, and remembered they were

snow-covered and so a symbol of Eda and her cold virginity, and he sighed. But something waked him up like a bomb that scatters and doesn't strike.

"'You're ridiculous, if you will permit me to say so,' old Telluria was remarking. 'You've got no army.'

"Oh, yes, pardon me,' said the queen, precisely and bitingly. 'Every man in Arcady is prepared to defend her to the death.'

"What with?-pitchforks, spades, and rakes?'

"Pitchforks, if that's what they happen to have in their hands at the minute. Spades and rakes? Yes. They keep her men well fed.'

"You've made no appropriation for the army since the late king died.'

"There was an implication here, and the queen heard it and broke two sticks of her fan in the good old way, and the prince, very wide awake now, felt his face grow hot. The implication was that this had been a sort of hand-to-mouth housekeeping woman's work, and not the old slam-bang immemorial style at all.

"We have made appropriations,' said the queen. She sounded icier than the snow on the Tellurian mountains. 'But not for war. Do you know what we have done with our money?'

"He did know, but he grunted out a wholesale repudiation of anything she could or might have done.

"'We've brought down the water from the mountains. It's in every man's dooryard. It flows through every man's vineyard, if he wants it. There are no droughts any more in Arcady; none that hurt us. Piping from the mountains costs a good bit, cousin Telluria. Piping on the mountains used to be the fashion; but now we can do that with a good heart, because we've done the other piping, too.'

"She was rather a gay little queen, you see, and she'd got her blood up. She could afford to jolly him. After all, he was only old Telluria out of a pack of cards. But he was a man, too, and he knew the secret springs of man's vanity and cowardice better even than she, though she was wiser than women are. All through this talk he had the air of setting her aside because she was a woman and calling on the prince to support him in man's tradition. You know

the recipe. When a woman cuts straight to the heart of things, you say to her in a fagged way, as if you'd been on deck since Adam, 'My dear, it isn't done that gait.' If she's bright and saucy she says, 'But it could be, and save the cost of miles of tape.' The queen knew her son was being inducted into the axioms of kingship, and her heart swelled and her throat choked and she could say nothing.

"Did you know,' said the king,—he was addressing the prince openly now-'did you know those damned Florians had discovered gold?'

"Now there is no reason why the Florians should be damned except that they live in a rocky, ungrateful spot where they are likely to come on metals that make them work very hard, sometimes underground, and rouse ill passions in the folks that don't have to work, but live in the light, necessarily, you see, so it can set off the Florian diamonds. That's what the sun is for. The prince said No, he hadn't known it. His port was beginning to swell perceptibly and he, too, left his mother out of the talk. He'd begun to wonder whether he'd been breeched sufficiently early. "I knew it,' said the queen. body listened.

But no

"I have a few fellows stationed there,' said the king, 'workmen ostensibly. They keep me informed, in cipher.'

"I have some very good friends among the Florian workmen,' said the queen. 'They tell me what has happened without reserve.'

Altaria-' Here he broke out and wasn't kingly for a minute-'By the Lord, I never heard of such a thing. Passing a province over to-to-' He was so mad he sputtered.

"To the power you filched it from,' said the queen. The chances are it will never happen, sir. We have left it to their option, and they are very loyal to us, very grateful.'

"But in case it did go back to Altaria,' said the king, 'I might feel obliged to put out a restraining hand. You see, my subjects there don't have all the privileges I could wish—'

"'Years ago,' said the queen, 'when the late king annexed Flos, he used those very arguments. Yet, as everybody remembers to our shame, that was the year the quicksilver was discovered.'

"Ah!' said the king suavely. He was stroking his kingly beard, and if it had been daylight it could probably have been seen that he looked greedy and very ugly. 'Ah, so it was.'

"And this year,' said the queen, 'they have discovered gold. And this year you think of annexing Flos.'

"They're troublesome neighbors,' said the king.

"They're rich neighbors,' said the queen.

"'Well,' said the king to Belphoœbus, as if this was a bargain between two. “Think it over.'

"They talk to me very freely,' said the queen, 'because they know I shall keep their confidence.'

""I don't care for those fellows,' said the king. "They've given us all a good deal of trouble, first and last. Of course,' he went on, still to the prince, ‘if it should happen that we formed any sort of alliance" Here he stopped, and it was evident what alliance he meant. He meant Eda.

"The prince got very hot and choked a little, but he answered straight off, with a becoming dignity, 'As to that, sir, it is in your hands and in hers.'

"In that case,' said the king, 'I should feel that we might work together in our ideas of Flos. But if you hand it back to

dignity toward his mother because she had been such a thriftless regent, and Queen Ismia holding her head so high you'd have thought she'd hardly see over her nose.

"Now the real part of my story is to come, so I'll scamp a little here and tell how the queen, in spite of this complication of her royal guest, pouring innuendo into the prince's ear about the good old ways of government, kept pressing the question of going to pay Erdreich, the poet, the royal respects. She had to, you see, it being a pact she'd made with Eda, who was probably at the cottage Erdreich, sweeping and dusting with strange implements, when she'd only been accustomed to riding-whips and golf-sticks. And perhaps, too, Eda was falling in love with the poet; for a poet

in the hand is worth twoscore princes in the bush. So they set out on horseback, the queen very sweet and smiling because she'd got her way, and the king quite grumpy because this trailing of poets seemed to him a waste of time, and the prince also grumpy now he was making a point of doing everything the king did: just as a little boy at school copies the big boy, or even swaggers and smokes like father. It was a pretty ride down a cliff road into a green valley with the sound of water all the way."

"Did you go, too?" I asked.

"Oh, yes. On a very good nag the queen had ordered out for me. There wasn't much talk, and that of an incidental sort. But once I thought I caught a glimpse, in a path alongside ours, of the scarecrow I'd seen running that morning to head off the prince. And the old king saw him too, and reined up and called to everybody indiscriminately:

***Secure that fellow!'

"But here the prince suddenly took a stand and was very princely.

"I beg your pardon,' said he. 'I think I'd let him go. He's only a poor fellow just out of prison. He runs extraordinarily. He ran me down the other day—I was on horseback, too-to tell me how glad he was to get back to Arcady.'

"Where'd he been?' fumed the king. I can see his old walrus mustaches bristling now. 'Where'd the fellow been?'

"The prince looked at him modestly, as if he'd really rather not say. Then he did answer in a very low tone.

"He was a Florian, sir, imprisoned for his attempt on the life of my father.'

"And he's out!' The old walrus needed an ice-floe to cool him now. 'You've let him out!'

"The prince was three-quarters turning to his mother. But she wouldn't help him. She wouldn't even hear.

"We judged it best,' said the prince. He didn't stutter. He was clear and cool. I fancied he was thinking what mother would wish him to say. 'What he did, he did from his sense of awful injustice. We'd treated the Florians like the deuce, you know. And so well, mother and I just let those prisoners out."

"Very well,' said the king. It was the way a Mauser would have spoken, if it could. If you and your mother are not

blown up for your pains, it isn't because you don't deserve to be. And if I'm in it with you, sir, I'll never forgive you, by God, never.'

"But now the figure wasn't to be seen any more among the trees. I rather debated with myself whether I'd seen it at all.

"After we had ridden some nine miles, the valley opened out into a place that smiled, a circle of green a good many acres wide, a place to be happy in, and there on the edge of the forest was a thatched cottage, all roses and pinks, and on the doorstep, in a brown frock, and looking as if she had caught an enchanted dream by the tail-feather and couldn't believe in it yet, sat the Princess Eda, her hair braided in a pigtail down her back. We had been going softly on the green, but when she saw us she looked up frightened and stood there, held by the royal instinct not to fly, and yet with the fear of her father written all over her face. But he'd no thought of her, and the queen gave her a careless cold glance and said to her:

"Go in, my good girl, and tell Erdreich and his mother their friends have come to visit them.'

"With that we dismounted, and the grooms that rode with us led the horses away to the shade; and out of the cottage came a beautiful old woman in the peasant dress of Arcady. Her hair was snow white, but thick and fine, as if it wasn't old at all, but some special kind of beautiful hair a young person as well might be glad to have. And she had pink cheeks and eyes bluer than anything, even blue flowers; for they've a surface, if it's only velvet, and here was liquid of a depth not to be plumbed. The old woman's eyes met the eyes of the queen. It was a strange look for a peasant and a queen to blend and take again. It seemed to ask and answer a question. 'Is all well?' asked the eyes of each, and the answer was, 'Not so very well.' But the queen did her part with a royal courtesy. They had come, she said, to see Erdreich. Was he at home? No, the old dame answered, with a careful deference, Erdreich was away on one of his stays in the forest. The queen knew how he withdrew himself, from time to time, and sought out the foresters and old men too feeble now to do anything but tend cattle on the mountainside, and took down from their lips the

stories and ballads of ancient Arcady. But the grandmother had heard his horn from the glade a mile farther on, by the brookside, and this was where he often lingered to make his poems to the sound of falling water. Now, before anybody else could get a chance, I very humbly and, I hope, not discourteously bowed before the queen -she was queen and woman, too, as well as regent; she liked the old customs of the bent knee and beseeching eyes-and asked permission to ride over to the glade and tell the poet he had guests at home. You see, I was dying to be in it, and I knew pretty well what the royal crowd here was likely to do: the queen to talk nicely to the old woman, the king to yawn his head off, because he didn't care a hoot for poetry, and the prince to hit his leg with his ridingcrop and wish he was at home trying on the crown. The queen gave me a smile. I have that smile now. I keep it by me. "By all means, go,' said she. 'We shall be indebted to you.'

"And I got my horse and rode away, and if I'd heard a jingle of any sort, even a couple of nickels in my pocket, I should have known I was a knight off on a quest to be remembered 'way through the twentieth century. The road roughened to a cart path, and the cart path ran impetuously into the forest, and got timid and narrowed until now the undergrowth brushed my horse's nose and closed against his flanks. And then it opened again, and there was daylight before me, green between trunks of trees. And I rode on at a trot and came out on a clearing, all bluebells, and there was a woodman's hut, and Erdreich and Bertelius sat on a bench by the door, deep in talk. How did I know them? By their mugs, man. Bertelius is one of the most celebrated Dryasdusts in the world. His nose for a first edition is longer than Cyrano's, and more sensitive than Rover's. And don't you s'pose I'd seen a photograph of Erdreich, the poet, in the translated volume of Miss de Smith, of Phoenix, Arizona? I halted, and tied my horse to a little beech-tree, and made myself known in rather more medieval language than I use every day, as a messenger from the queen. Would Erdreich be pleased to come home and let royalty show him how inferior royalty thought itself, at this stage of the world's progress? I ex

pected him to jump up, beg me to mount my horse, and let him, hand on flank, trot after me back again and so go tailing into notoriety. Nothing of the sort. He was very courteous, this young poet, very grave and unaffected, but he'd got some other bee in his bonnet besides the plaudits of royalty. It buzzed most horribly and scared the other one away. Bertelius took no manner of notice of me. In his eyes I was probably an outlander speaking indifferent Arcadian and not likely to understand a tithe of what he began to pour out in a rush, all of it adjurations to Erdreich to 'remember, remember."

"How did he look? Was he really an old man?'" "Is he, you mean. He's not dead yet. Bertelius-well, he looks absolutely and entirely as if you had made up a recipe for a librarian and had the finishing touches put on by a costumer: long beard, eyes permanently in hiding, little cap, and a sort of monkish habit. And Erdreich was a very spectacular young person, handsomer than the prince, oh, far handsomer. I was glad Eda hadn't seen him first. He was all yellow hair and blue eyes, and strong as a forester: which he was, indeed, before he dropped into poetry. Now I took the cue old Bertelius thrust on me, and I stood there by my horse dull and dumb as a groom, and listening. (Do you ever think how much listening is done by the chaps that are hanging round to do things, the ones the novelists give 'impassive faces' to? You'd think their ears would grow by cocking.) And it's my long suit that I can understand any language you'll mention better than I speak it. So there you are. Bertelius and I might have been hobnobbing at a coffee Klatsch, and he giving me his entire confidence and attention for all I lost.

"You are a young man, Erdreich,' said he. 'Heed an old one.'

"Erdreich looked at him much as the prince had been looking at the King of Telluria, with the worship of the ignorant for the seasoned, the wistful gleam in the eye that says, 'If I knew what you do, how much better I could use it. I don't hanker after being you; but oh, how I want to know!' It's precisely like the puppy trotting round after the old sheep-killer. 'I won't kill sheep,' says the puppy's eye.

'Oh, no! but just let me come into the pasture and see you nab 'em.'

"Your genius is buried here,' said Bertelius, and I could see he was Bertelius the tempter. 'All the best years of your life when you should have been writing your splendid dramas, you have been wandering round the forest reviving old ballads.'

"You know why,' said the poet. He looked, in spite of his fresh color, worn and worried, as if his day's excursion with Bertelius had been a sort of debauch. 'I wanted to write my dramas, but my grandmother told me-begged me-to collect the folk-songs first, because in a little time all the people that know them will be dead.'

"Your grandmother!' said the man of books. It was pity in his tone; it was implication. "Think,' it seemed to say, 'think, young poet, what you are telling me. You are saying that you allow the mammal who brought your mother and incidentally you into the world and provided you with food for a few years after, to settle the status of your most admirable and unusual brain. Think what you are saying. It is absurd.' Bertelius spoke significantly. 'This is a country,' said he, 'governed by women. Telluria is governed by a man.' "The poet had flushed up a deep girlish pink. He began to justify his grandmother, justify himself.

"She knew the way my genius-my tastes-went. My dramas were all for war.' "War,' said Bertelius gravely, 'is a necessity, an ill necessity.'

"The poet's eyes began to glow.

"But she says,' he began, and then apologized. 'Grandmother is very wise.' Bertelius bowed benignantly. She says the mind of the people inflames so easily. They can't bear dramas of war, she says. Give them the old legends of honor, of reaping and sowing, of hunger and thirst that the children may be fed. Give them those, she says, and teach them to look on war as an insane fury.'

"Bertelius bowed again. His delicate mouth curled up a little at the corners.

"Very amiable,' said he, 'very feminine and sweet. Ladies are temperamentally timid. We won't discuss that. But let me urge you again to come to Telluria and revive our ballads for us.'

6

"Not if other things go with it. But in Telluria you would have time for the other things, your dramas, your glorious dramas.'

"I saw the game. Dryasdust wanted the ballads of his own country dug out of oblivion, and this boy had the antiquary nose. The drama business was lagnappe, thrown in. It was time for me to fling a stone and make a ripple. I stepped forward. I spoke with the deepest respect.

"Am I to tell her majesty,' I said, 'that her poet declines to come?'

"Erdreich was on his feet. He was pale now, white as Bertelius's beard. It was not the custom in Arcady, I could see, for Queen Ismia to be told it wasn't convenient.

"I'll come,' said he, 'I'll come at once.' He turned to Bertelius. 'Shall I leave you, sir? Or will you come?'

"Old Bertelius had got out a black book and a pair of horn spectacles. The fire had died down in him, and he was fractious and hungry for the seclusion of the printed page. 'Ay, ay,' said he. 'Go. Think it over. I'll come by and by.'

666

"So we left him there, and I, leading my horse-for the poet had refused to take it and let me follow-we made short work of the distance, and quite silent and rather hot, came out on the cottage again. And there I could read at once the history of the time since I'd been gone, and read it from the two pictures there before me. The king and the prince were together pacing up and down before the door, the king soliloquizing and the prince giving ear. Just inside, by a window of plants, were the queen and the peasant grandmother, standing face to face, eye to eye, and very grave. The two groups were like hostile armies during truce. When we came up, the tension broke, and the prince spoke to Erdreich very prettily as if he were a brother, and telling him the queen was within. Would he go in and greet her. Erdreich, all a timid propriety, went in, and the other two followed, but I stood outside by the little window. I began to feel I was out of the picture, and I'd better be content with listening. Well, there were fine speeches, and the queen told Erdreich what a loyal subject he was, and told the king how valuable Erdreich was, and talked with her eyelids and brows to the prince to the effect that he was to say so too. But

out a look at anybody, got out a wheel and