King and Joker [antikvár]

The first 'joke' that Princess Louise actually witnessed took place in the Breakfast Room at Buckingham Palace on the last morning of the school summer holidays.Father gave one of his warning snorts and looked down at the typed list beside his place.'Two hundred and five,' he said. 'Cease automatic supply of sealing-wax in guest bedrooms.'Mother put her spoon carefully back into her dish of Fortnum and Mason's Soya Forage (by appointment).'Most certainly not,' said Mother. 'Hue cannot expect visitors to ask for sealing-huax huenever they huish to bestow a decoration on somebody.''I'd have thought people who bestowed decorations carried the kit around with them,' said Nonny.Albert, not looking up from slicing his second raw carrot into accurate rounds, said, 'Sheikh Umu certainly did. When he gave me the Order of the White Oryx he sealed it by folding a strip of silver over the corner of the skin it was written on and biting it firm with his teeth.''Was it oryx skin?' asked Louise.'Of course not,' said Albert. 'Umu's an ecology nut. That's why we hit it off so well. Last bloke he caught shooting oryx he had publicly castrated.''I take it,' said Father, 'that there's no suggestion that we should provide strips of silver in the guest bedrooms.''Couldn't one of the footmen make it his business to see that there's sealing-wax in the room when that sort of bloke comes visiting?' said Albert. He then did his usual trick of looking up for a moment from his carrot, staring like a highly intelligent blue-eyed orang at the person he was talking to, popping a slice of carrot into the hole in the middle of his wild ginger beard, and instantly starting on sbcty silent mastications, still staring.