[Illustration: Suit he had made in Oshkosh 111]
I looked like a picture out of a fourteenth century book, but dad looked like a clown in a circus. One of dad's calves made him look as though he had a milk leg, cause the padding would not stay around where the calf ought to be, but worked around towards his shin. We went to Marlboro House in a hansom cab, and all the way there the driver kept looking down from the hurricane deck, through the scuttle hole, to see if we were there yet, and he must have talked with other cab drivers in sign language about us, for every driver kept along with us, looked at us and laughed, as though we were a wild west show.
On the way to the king's residence it was all I could do to keep dad braced up to go through the ordeal. He was brave enough before we got the invitation, and told what he was going to say to the king, and you would think he wasn't afraid of anybody, but when we got nearer to the house and dad thought of going up to the throne and seeing a king in all his glory, surrounded by his hundreds of lords and dukes and things, a crown on his head, and an ermine cloak trimmed with red velvet, and a six-quart milk pan full of diamonds, some of them as big as a chunk of alum, dad weakened, and wanted to give the whole thing up and go to a matinee, but I wouldn't have it, and told him if he didn't get into the king row now that I would shake him right there in London and start in business as a Claude Duval highwayman and hold up stage coaches, and be hung on Tyburn Tree, as I used to read about in my history of Sixteen-String Jack and other English highwaymen. Dad didn't want to see the family disgraced, so he let the cabman drive on, but he said if we got out of this visit to royalty alive, it was the last tommyrot he would indulge in.
Well, old man, it is like having an operation for appendicitis, you feel better when you come out from under the influence of the chloroform and the doctor shows you what they took out of you, and you feel that you are going to live, unless you grow another vermiform appendix. We were driven into a sort of Central park, and up to a building that was big as a lot of exposition buildings, and the servants took us in charge and walked us through long rooms covered with pictures as big as side show pictures at a circus, but instead of snake charmers and snakes and wild men of Borneo and sword swallowers, the king's pictures were about war, and women without much clothes on from the belt up. Gosh, but some of those pictures made you think you could hear the roar of battle and smell gun powder, and dad acted as though he wanted to git right down on the marble floor and dig a rifle pit big enough to git into.