The Little Prince

As the captains and the kings paraded on and off the stage in official Washington last week, one little scene-stealer grabbed his own private spotlight and held it right down to the last curtain. He was solemn little Prince Mashhur ibn Saud. 3 1/2, son of the Saudi Arabian King, who had only to blink his liquid brown eyes to evoke cooings and mental chin-chucks across the nation.

The little prince had no sooner been lodged in President Eisenhower's suite at Walter Reed Army Hospital, where Army doctors diagnosed his affliction--cerebral palsy--and prescribed special footwear and therapy (TIME, Feb. 11), than letters and gifts began pouring in to Blair House. The first grade at Nance School in Clinton, Okla., wrote that they had seen him on television and wished him well. Kindergarten children in a Long Island public school spent the $1 surplus from their cookie fund for a couple of plastic toys, some crayons, a coloring book, lollipops and a jigsaw puzzle, sent them along to the hospital.

The boy lived it up: down the corridors of the hospital he loped (as best he could) with his toy cowboy gun hanging from his hip. Back home at Blair House, there were cowboy and Indian suits, a drum, a road-scraper, a Mickey Mouse hat, a bicycle, lollipops, a toy tractor from the President. As if proof were needed that children are the same the world over, he presided at a children's party at the Saudi Arabian embassy and started a typical childlike ruckus of his own. Photographers asked him. to kiss a little American girl, Mary Harris, granddaughter of U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia George Wadsworth. The prince tried to oblige, was repulsed. With that, Mashhur brandished a small fist, whacked the tearful girl on the shoulder, got his buss.

The week over, the Arabs prepared for their homeward trip. Somehow the presence of the somber child had taken the edge off much of the quibbling produced by the cautious politics and flaring passions that surrounded the King himself. The little prince had indeed stolen the show. The proof, in a sense, lay in the two extra trunks bought in the U.S. by the Arabs, in which will be shipped the plastic toys and doodads that are gifts from American children.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.