Democratic Sentinel, Volume 13, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 6 September 1889 — Belgium’s Hatless Monarch. [ARTICLE]

Belgium’s Hatless Monarch.

Leopold, King of the Belgians, is a sworn foe of tobacco and an ardent supporter of the Belgian Anti-tobacco League. He is, as well, a man of “sinaple and severe way of life.” He rises early, breakfasts sparingly, and —a rare thing on the Continent—takes his morning tub with all an Englishman’s fervor. His -wide sympathies embrace vegetarianism in their scope, and his most notable passion, perhaps, is for going about without a hat. Whenever the weather is suitable, King Leopold goes abroad in his garden as hatless as Adam, exulting in his freedom from the conventionality of a head-piece. He has some strange craze about the wind’s action on the brain, and he puts his craze in practice whenever possible. In fact, eccentricity of the intelligent kind marked him for her own. He is a linguist of rare acquisitions, and is always deep in the study of some new language or other. Music is one of his aversions, but the sister art of painting finds in him an appreciative and enthusiastic amateur. His face is strong and intelligent, without being handsome, and a

beard of appropriately regal length ■weeps his chest.— London Court Journal.