far as they might, the course of the balloon.  Now in America this could not have occurred, for the balloon man would not have been aloft at such an hour.  He would have been on the earth; moreover he would have been outside the walls of that mansion house, along with half a million, more or less, of his patriotic fellow countrymen, tearing his own clothes off and their clothes off, trampling the weak and sickly underfoot, bucking the doubled and tripled police lines in a mad, vain effort to see the flagpole on the roof or a corner of the rear garden wall.  For that house was Clarence House, and the young man who posed so accommodatingly for the photographer was none other than Prince Arthur of Connaught, who was getting himself married the very next day.

The next day I beheld from a short distance the passing of the bridal procession.  Though there were crowds all along the route followed by the wedding party, there was no scrouging, no shoving, no fighting, no disorderly scramble, no unseemly congestion about the chapel where the ceremony took place.  It reminded me vividly of that which inevitably happens when a millionaire’s daughter is being married to a duke in a fashionable Fifth Avenue church—­it reminded me of that because it was so different.

Fortunately for us we were so placed that we saw quite distinctly the entrance of the wedding party into the chapel inclosure.  Personally I was most concerned with the members of the royal house.  As I recollect, they passed in the following order: 

His Majesty, King George the Fifth. 
Her Majesty, Queen Mary, the Other Four Fifths. 
Small fractional royalties to the number of a dozen or more.

I got a clear view of the side face of the queen.  As one looked on her profile, which was what you might call firm, and saw the mild-looking little king, who seemed quite eclipsed by her presence, one understood—­or anyway one thought one understood—­why an English assemblage, when standing to chant the national anthem these times, always puts such fervor and meaning into the first line of it.

Only one untoward incident occurred:  The inevitable militant lady broke through the lines as the imperial carriage passed and threw a Votes for Women handbill into His Majesty’s lap.  She was removed thence by the police with the skill and dexterity of long practice.  The police were competently on the job.  They always are—­which brings me round to the subject of the London bobby and leads me to venture the assertion that individually and collectively, personally and officially, he is a splendid piece of work.  The finest thing in London is the London policeman and the worst thing is the shamefully small and shabby pay he gets.  He is majestic because he represents the majesty of the English law; he is humble and obliging because, as a servant, he serves the people who make the law.  And always he knows his business.