Page:The King's Men (1884).djvu/272

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THE KING'S MEN.

Lincoln they will re-elect him, and if the administration is changed, diplomacy and entreaty may accomplish a general release of political prisoners. The cause of the House of Hanover is so dead that, as Mother Goose says:

"'All the king's horses and all the king's men,
Couldn't set Humpty Dumpty up again.'

By the way, I believe they call George King Humpty Dumpty in the comic papers."

The Duke smiled ruefully; in his heart he despised the King, and faintly saw that his class had lost their privileges, but he could not get used to it. He knew that he was a broken old man, an exile from home, and dependent upon the kindness of Mr. Windsor; and he sighed deeply, wishing that he had died before the deluge which had gulfed all that was holy and precious to him.

Mr. Windsor saw that his thoughts were too sad and solemn for an alien intrusion, and left the old gentleman, still motionless, looking vacantly at the wall. The old Duke saw no Mount Ararat rising from the troubled waters; all that made life worth living for him had passed away, and he lagged superfluous on the stage; a supernumerary with a pasteboard coronet; laughed at and ranted about in the pantomime at which the world had laughed, "King Humpty Dumpty."

That afternoon Maggie Windsor had gone for her usual walk upon the Charles River embankment, a fine esplanade stretching for seven miles along the river-side. It was a beautiful day—one of those rare days which gladden the drear northern spring and remind dwellers in Boston that they live under the same latitude under which Naples idles. A turn of the Gulf Stream and the descendants of