attention to the vain declamations which the solitude and disgust familiar to kings suggest to the happiest dispositions?”

“I only paid attention to one thing, my son, and that was, that you were complaining.”

“Who! I? Not at all,” said Louis XIV.; “no, in truth, you err, madame.”

“What were you doing, then?”

“I thought I was under the ferule of my professor, and developing a subject of amplification.”

“My son,” replied Anne of Austria, shaking her head, “you are wrong not to trust my word; you are wrong not to grant me your confidence. A day will come, and perhaps quickly, wherein you will have occasion to remember that axiom: —