being desirous, I suppose, of talking with one who had come so recently
from his own country.

At that time the King, with the Queen, Prince Peter, and his two
unmarried daughters, was occupying a modest suite in the Hotel Meurice,
in the rue de Rivoli. He received me in a large, sun-flooded room
overlooking the Tuileries Gardens. The bald, broad-shouldered, rather
bent old man in the blue serge suit, with a tin ear-trumpet in his hand,
who rose from behind a great flat-topped desk to greet me, was a
startling contrast to the tall and vigorous figure, in the picturesque
dress of a Montenegrin chieftain, whom I had seen in Cetinje before the
war. I looked at him with interest, for he has been on the throne longer
than any living sovereign, he is the father-in-law of two Kings, and is
connected by marriage with half the royal houses of Europe, and he is
the last of that long line of patriarch-rulers who, leading their armies
in person, have for more than two centuries maintained the independence
of the Black Mountain and its people.

[Illustration: HIS MAJESTY NICHOLAS I. KING OF MONTENEGRO

He has been on the throne longer than any living sovereign, he is the
father-in-law of two kings, and is connected by marriage with half the
royal houses of Europe]

King Nicholas, as is generally known, has been remarkably successful in
marrying off his daughters, two of them having married Kings, two
others grand dukes, while a fifth became the wife of a Battenberg
prince. Remembering this, I was sorely tempted to ask the King as to the
truth of a story which I had heard in Cetinje years before. An English
visitor to the Montenegrin capital had been invited to lunch at the