The head of the governments the Grand Caliph, was elected for a term of twenty years.  I questioned the wisdom of this.  I was answered that he could do no harm, since the ministry and the parliament governed the land, and he was liable to impeachment for misconduct.  This great office had twice been ably filled by women, women as aptly fitted for it as some of the sceptred queens of history.  Members of the cabinet, under many administrations, had been women.

I found that the pardoning power was lodged in a court of pardons, consisting of several great judges.  Under the old regime, this important power was vested in a single official, and he usually took care to have a general jail delivery in time for the next election.

I inquired about public schools.  There were plenty of them, and of free colleges too.  I inquired about compulsory education.  This was received with a smile, and the remark: 

“When a man’s child is able to make himself powerful and honoured according to the amount of education he acquires, don’t you suppose that that parent will apply the compulsion himself?  Our free schools and free colleges require no law to fill them.”

There was a loving pride of country about this person’s way of speaking which annoyed me.  I had long been unused to the sound of it in my own.  The Gondour national airs were forever dinning in my ears; therefore I was glad to leave that country and come back to my dear native land, where one never hears that sort of music.

A MEMORY,

When I say that I never knew my austere father to be enamoured of but one poem in all the long half century that he lived, persons who knew him will easily believe me; when I say that I have never composed but one poem in all the long third of a century that I have lived, persons who know me will be sincerely grateful; and finally, when I say that the poem which I composed was not the one which my father was enamoured of, persons who may have known us both will not need to have this truth shot into them with a mountain howitzer before they can receive it.  My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy—­a sort of armed neutrality so to speak.  At irregular intervals this neutrality was broken, and suffering ensued; but I will be candid enough to say that the breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between us—­which is to say, my father did the breaking, and I did the suffering.  As a general thing I was a backward, cautious, unadventurous boy; but I once jumped off a two-story table; another time I gave an elephant a “plug” of tobacco and retired without waiting for an answer; and still another time I pretended to be talking in my sleep, and got off a portion of a very wretched original conundrum in the hearing of my father.  Let us not pry into the result; it was of no consequence to any one but me.