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 opened; but they forgot it by bed-time. Affairs couldn't be worse than they had been, they decided, with that remarkable phlegm which has ever been Marken's most distinguishing trait, and let it go at that.

On the following day the shops had nice pictures of the new chancellor for sale, all of which had been left by a giant, "on commission," who was voted a queer sort of chap, inasmuch as sometimes he failed to hear, or at least declined to answer. This gave them cause for gossip, it being an innovation to thus advertise the face of the chancellor. They did not know that a more mystified person was the chancellor himself, who speculated vainly on what the fertile-brained King's Remembrancer could have "up his sleeve" in this latest divertissement, and not in the least suspecting that it was for the purpose of making his features so widely known that he could never run away.

The Court Gazette, that highly aloof official organ whose smallest paragraph was read with awe, proved the next distraction. It intimated that great changes were about to take place in the administration of the kingdom, all of which would tend to the aggrandisement of Marken, and would probably bring it into the rank of First Powers of the world; whatever that might be. Elderly gentlemen wagged their heads sagely, [154]