It is always so, you know. Every bright young imagination is apt
to find greater glories in the misty past, or grander
possibilities in a still more misty future than in the too
practical and prosaic present in which both duty and destiny lie.
And so Helena the princess, Leaning against the soft cushions of
her gilded barge, had sighed for the days of the old-time British
valor and freedom, and, even as she looked off toward the
approaching triareme, she was wondering how she could awake to
thoughts of British glory her rather heavy-witted father, Coel
the King--an hereditary prince of that ancient Britain in which
he was now, alas, but a tributary prince of the all too powerful
Rome.
Now, "old King Cole," as Mother Goose tells us--for young
Helena's father was none other than the veritable "old King Cole"
of our nursery jingle--was a "jolly old soul," and a jolly old
soul is very rarely an independent or ambitious one. So long as
he could have "his pipe and his bowl" not, of course, his long
pipe of tobacco that all the Mother Goose artists insist upon
giving him--but the reed pipe upon which his musicians played--so
long, in other words, as he could live in ease and comfort,
undisturbed in his enjoyment of the good things of life by his
Roman over-lords, he cared for no change.
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