In our country, children play “keep house;” and in the same high-sounding but miniature way the grown folk here, with the poor little material of slender territory and meagre population, play “empire.”  There is his royal Majesty the King, with a New York detective’s income of thirty or thirty-five thousand dollars a year from the “royal civil list” and the “royal domain.”  He lives in a two-story frame “palace.”

And there is the “royal family”—­the customary hive of royal brothers, sisters, cousins and other noble drones and vagrants usual to monarchy, —­all with a spoon in the national pap-dish, and all bearing such titles as his or her Royal Highness the Prince or Princess So-and-so.  Few of them can carry their royal splendors far enough to ride in carriages, however; they sport the economical Kanaka horse or “hoof it” with the plebeians.

Then there is his Excellency the “royal Chamberlain”—­a sinecure, for his majesty dresses himself with his own hands, except when he is ruralizing at Waikiki and then he requires no dressing.

Next we have his Excellency the Commander-in-chief of the Household Troops, whose forces consist of about the number of soldiers usually placed under a corporal in other lands.

Next comes the royal Steward and the Grand Equerry in Waiting—­high dignitaries with modest salaries and little to do.

Then we have his Excellency the First Gentleman of the Bed-chamber—­an office as easy as it is magnificent.

Next we come to his Excellency the Prime Minister, a renegade American from New Hampshire, all jaw, vanity, bombast and ignorance, a lawyer of “shyster” calibre, a fraud by nature, a humble worshipper of the sceptre above him, a reptile never tired of sneering at the land of his birth or glorifying the ten-acre kingdom that has adopted him—­salary, $4,000 a year, vast consequence, and no perquisites.

Then we have his Excellency the Imperial Minister of Finance, who handles a million dollars of public money a year, sends in his annual “budget” with great ceremony, talks prodigiously of “finance,” suggests imposing schemes for paying off the “national debt” (of $150,000,) and does it all for $4,000 a year and unimaginable glory.

Next we have his Excellency the Minister of War, who holds sway over the royal armies—­they consist of two hundred and thirty uniformed Kanakas, mostly Brigadier Generals, and if the country ever gets into trouble with a foreign power we shall probably hear from them.  I knew an American whose copper-plate visiting card bore this impressive legend:  “Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Infantry.”  To say that he was proud of this distinction is stating it but tamely.  The Minister of War has also in his charge some venerable swivels on Punch-Bowl Hill wherewith royal salutes are fired when foreign vessels of war enter the port.

Next comes his Excellency the Minister of the Navy—­a nabob who rules the “royal fleet,” (a steam-tug and a sixty-ton schooner.)