THE DUTIES OF GOVERNMENT
By Your Cruise Director

Samwise Gamgee was content to serve as Mayor of Michel Delving, though he felt that the title should have belonged to Frodo, who had saved the Shire. Then King Elessar made Sam a Counsellor of the North-kingdom and travelled to visit him there. It was easier in his presence to remember that the king had been only a Ranger, once, when Sam was a gardener, back in the days when their loyalties lay not in lands but in the hands of those they loved.

Sam did not know how to explain his sorrow to Aragorn until he recognized the vambraces that the king still wore strapped to his arms. Now the mayor understood that the king had been as broken on the day his Steward died as Sam had been when Frodo sailed into the West. Yet in taking the crown and giving his devotion to Gondor, Aragorn had done just as Boromir wished. In much the same way, Frodo had left the Shire in Sam's own keeping; and so he kept it, not only for its own sake, but because Frodo had said that he should be mayor, and keep alive the memory of the age that was gone.