Sinister Efforts

A United Press despatch from Paris read, last week: "Recent reports from Rumanian sources tell of sinister political efforts to diminish the importance of the 'Boy King' in the eyes of his own people. 'He is not normally developed,' some have said. 'He is deaf, does not know how to talk and stories of his brilliance are all false.' "

Meanwhile at Bucharest the Dowager Queen Marie, grandmama of Boy King

Mihai, said to a U. S. citizen not a correspondent : "You may quote me with full authority as saying that Mihai is not abnormal in any way. He is neither backward nor precocious. He is not deaf. Sometimes it seems to his mother [Prin-cess Helen] and me that Mihai can be very absent-minded about remembering to do as he is told. But what normal child is not? . . . "Some of the American rotogravures, I believe, have printed pictures of my grandson with the statement that my pet name for him is 'Madcap Mihai' or even 'Mad Mihai'! I have never called my grandson by any such names." Observers recalled that the "sinister efforts" of partisans of the abdicated Crown Prince Carol to discredit his son, King Mihai, achieved such success, last year, that several worried Rumanian aristocrats hurried for authentic information to one of the few men who was generally trusted and esteemed in intriguing, scandalmongering Bucharest--a man from Emporia, Kan., William Smith Culbertson, then Minister to Rumania, now Ambassador to Chile. The Rumanians knew that King Mihai had several times been brought to play in the U. S. Legation garden with Mr. Culbertson's small daughters (whom reckless correspondents described as "sons" on one such occasion). The American Minister, having addressed His Majesty and perceived that he is not deaf, and having received from his own eyes and daughters, ample testimony of the six-year-old monarch's normalcy, was able and glad to reassure Rumanians who had not access to their King. A scurrilous despatch from Bucharest, last week, envisioned His Majesty as licking with relish and sticking onto many an envelope stamps of the new series which bears his portrait (see cut).