“Yesterday,” she remarked, “was Nicholas’s birthday,” referring to her second son, Prince Nicholas, who, since his elder brother, Prince Carol, renounced his rights to the throne in order to marry the girl he loved, has become the heir apparent.  “At breakfast his father remarked, ’I’m sorry, Nicholas, but I haven’t any birthday present for you.  The shops in Bucharest were pretty well cleaned out by the Germans, you know, and I didn’t remember your birthday in time to send to Paris for a present.’  ‘Do you really wish to give Nicholas a present, Nando?’ (the diminutive of Ferdinand) I asked him.  ‘Of course I do,’ the King answered, ’but what is there to give him?’ ‘That’s the easiest thing in the world,’ I replied.  ’There is nothing that would give Nicholas so much pleasure as an engraving of his dear father—­on a thousand-franc note.’”

Prince Nicholas, the future king of Rumania, who is being educated at Eton, looks and acts like any normal American “prep” school boy.

“Do the boys still wear top hats at Eton?” I asked him.

“Yes, they do,” he answered, “but it’s a silly custom.  And they cost two guineas apiece.  I leave it to you, Major, if two guineas isn’t too much for any hat.”

When I told him that in democratic America certain Fifth Avenue hatters charge the equivalent of five guineas for a bowler he looked at me in frank unbelief.  “But then,” he remarked, “all Americans are rich.”

Shortly before luncheon we were joined by King Ferdinand, a slenderly built man, somewhat under medium height, with a grizzled beard, a genial smile and merry, twinkling eyes.  He wore the gray-green field uniform and gold-laced kepi of a Rumanian general, the only thing about his dress which suggested his exalted rank being the insignia of the Order of Michael the Brave, which hung from his neck by a gold-and-purple ribbon.  Were you to see him in other clothes and other circumstances you might well mistake him for an active and successful professional man.  King Ferdinand is the sort of man one enjoys chatting with in front of an open fire over the cigars, for, in addition to being a shrewd judge of men and events and having a remarkably exact knowledge of world affairs, he possesses in an altogether exceptional degree the qualities of tact, kindliness and humor.

The King did not hesitate to express his indignation that the re-making of the map of Europe should have been entrusted to men who possessed so little first-hand knowledge of the nations whose boundaries they were re-shaping.

“A few days before the signing of the Treaty of St. Germain,” he told me, “Lloyd George sent for one of the experts attached to the Peace Conference.

“‘Where is this Banat that Rumania and Serbia are quarreling over?’ he inquired.

“‘I will show you, sir,’ the attache answered, unrolling a map of southeastern Europe.  For several minutes he explained in detail to the British Premier the boundaries of the Banat and the conflicting territorial claims to which its division had given rise.  But when he paused Lloyd George made no response.  He was sound asleep!