THE Emperor William has a great horror of every possible kind of infection, especially of the ordinary cold.

Unhappy officials summoned to Court while suffering from this minor ailment may be seen using surreptitious pocket-handkerchiefs behind the kindly shelter of a palm, or slipping through the window on to the terrace to indulge in the inevitable sneeze out of range of His Majesty’s observation.

Whenever the Emperor himself catches the complaint he at once retires to bed till the worst is over, and all engagements are cancelled until he is well again.

“Go to bed and perspire” (only he uses a more forcible Anglo-Saxon word) is the advice he gives and follows.

Upon the shoulders of his medical attendants, two in number, rests the responsibility of safeguarding the Emperor as much as possible from every source of infection.

How many panic-stricken exits from one palace to another do I remember! Flights at an hour’s notice from measles, chicken-pox, or scarlet fever, sometimes only to meet an equally dire disease already installed before us.

On one occasion the Court had just returned from Berlin after the season, and had settled down comfortably at the New Palace, when some tiresome child in the Communs opposite was found to be suffering from measles, and we were all (with the exception of the Emperor, fortunately absent for two days) hurried off to the Marmor Palais, which happened to be totally unfurnished, all its chairs and tables having been warehoused for the winter and not yet replaced.

We wandered about the garden there, watching the arrival of the vans, which had been hastily summoned together, and now slowly and at long intervals disgorged their contents at every door.

The rooms allotted to the ladies were in a little Dutch cottage in the garden, and contained only a few clothes-pegs, on which to hang hats and coats. By slow degrees washstands, chairs, wardrobes, kept slowly filtering in—though many of us had to wash our hands at the tap in the passage before going to dine with the Empress.

Somewhere about ten o’clock at night the beds began to arrive, and for the next few days existence partook largely of the disjointed, uncertain, intermittent nature of a picnic. Except for the moral support afforded by the white kid gloves and fan, to which we clung convulsively through that long chaos, we should with difficulty have been able to preserve the decent atmosphere proper to a court.

Another sudden exodus occurred once, when the whole Court, including the Emperor, were for the first time installed for the winter in Belle Vue, with its charming garden, which had been recommended by the doctors as a salutary change from the Schloss in the Lust-Garten, which possesses only a few sooty trees on a grass plot two yards square.

Everybody was delighted with the innovation, and the last dresses were being hung in the wardrobes, the finishing touches given to the delightfully quaint, sunny little freshly-painted rooms overlooking the green Tier-Garten, when a rumour ran shuddering through the palace. We were to pack up at once and return to the gloomy old Schloss at the other end of the town. Prince Oskar, just returned from Italy, had developed chicken-pox—that very catching illness—and was to remain in Belle Vue with his adjutant and servants, while the rest of us migrated elsewhere.

So all the luggage had to be re-packed, and before evening we had retired from the chicken-pox, only to find that after all it had come with us—for the young Princess Alexandra of Schleswig-Holstein, who was staying at the Court, and had just become engaged to her cousin Prince August Wilhelm, the Emperor’s fourth son, fell ill of the complaint almost immediately; but we remained where we were and did not travel farther.

Their Majesties were due to pay a visit to England in a few days’ time, and many telegrams passed between the two countries, the Prussian Court fearing to bring the chicken-pox with them, while the English one implored them to come all the same, as nobody there was the least afraid of it. The upshot was that the visit was paid, the Germans spending an apprehensive week in England, always on the alert for symptoms which happily never appeared.

Some time afterwards, the Empress in discussing this outbreak of chicken-pox remarked that she had not been at all anxious about any one but the Emperor. It was entirely for his sake that the doctors had thought it well to move from Belle Vue.

“No, not at all,” vehemently spoke His Majesty, who happened to overhear what his wife said. “I had chicken-pox long ago when I was a boy. I wasn’t at all afraid of it.”

“But, Wilhelm!” said the astonished Empress, “I never knew. Why didn’t you say so then?”

“Nobody asked me,” said the Emperor grimly; “the doctors ordered us off, and there was the end of it. They never told me that it was on my account. I thought that you were afraid of it.”

This is the kind of thing that is apt to occur when people try to be a little too tactful.

“I don’t know,” said the Princess, “why we fly about so much trying to run away from various diseases; we must be always meeting and swallowing microbes.”

In Berlin during the wet weather the Emperor with difficulty can get the exercise he needs. He has had a covered tennis-court built in the grounds of Mon-Bijou Schloss, a short five minutes’ walk from the palace on the Lust-Garten; and here, when the weather continued persistently rainy, His Majesty, in a frightfully overheated building, would play with any young officers who were fairly expert at the game. None of them appeared to enjoy the honour very much. The oppressive atmosphere, combined with the nervous apprehension natural to the occasion—the fear lest an unlucky ball, with the hideous perversity of inanimate dumb things, might perhaps rebound with force against the sacred person of His Majesty or, as sometimes happened, fall into the midst of the tea-table presided over by the Empress—paralyzed the hand of even the least imaginative lieutenant.

“I feel all unstrung and frightened,” confided one of these unfortunate youths to me. “Supposing I happened to give His Majesty a black eye?”

“But,” I objected, “nobody gets black eyes at tennis.”

“No, I know that, but still I’m always thinking it might happen; and you know Von Braun’s ball went bang into the Empress’s teacup and flung the tea all over her gown. His mother was in tears when she heard of it.”

As an alternative to indoor tennis, of which he speedily grows tired, the Emperor rides on rainy afternoons in the fine large Reit-Bahn or riding-school of the royal stables, where one of the regimental bands is stationed in the gallery, and plays the latest operatic music as His Majesty and the adjutants canter round.

To the despair of the Master of the Horse he insists on having the Reit-Bahn also artificially heated.

“The whole stable will be coughing to-morrow,” groan the unhappy officials as they ponder on the evil effects upon the horses of the warm atmosphere. But the Emperor likes to feel that he is “getting rid,” he says, “of a little bit of myself.”

Once, as the riders were trotting round the Bahn, smoke was observed to be issuing from the coat-tails of one of the adjutants, who was carrying a box of matches in his pocket. This small incident amused the Emperor and restored his good-humour, always a little affected by bad weather. At supper he told the tale with all the dramatic exaggerations in which his soul delights, describing the young officer’s plight as “painful in the extreme.”

Nothing pleases the Emperor more than to “chaff” his intimate friends about their private weaknesses. At Rominten he would tell interminable adventures of Admiral von Hollman—“MÄnnchen,” as he used to call him—all hinging on this gallant old officer’s knack of losing his umbrella and his luggage.

“He usually arrives at a state reception without a helmet, or something of that kind. Left it on the steamer or in the train; took it off to have a nap, and then forgot all about it,—and as for umbrellas! He buys them now by the gross. Finds it cheaper!”

The old Admiral shakes his head, but looks a little guilty.

“Yes, yes,” he says dubiously: “umbrellas! they are—they are—a little evasive. I think of them all the time, and then—in a moment—they are gone. It is marvellous, Your Majesty, marvellous how they disappear.”

“Last Christmas,” says the Emperor, speaking to the table at large, “the Empress gives him a beautiful new silk umbrella, with his name and address on it in large letters. What is the result? He sets off home taking his umbrella with him. How far do you think?” The Emperor thumps the table to emphasize the astonishing absent-mindedness of the admiral. “Why, he actually leaves it in the carriage that takes him to the station—leaves it in the carriage—loses it in the first half-hour of possession.”

The Admiral wears a shamefaced smile like a guilty schoolboy.

“But that wasn’t the end of it, Your Majesty—it was found again.”

“Found again!” shouts the Emperor, bursting into a roar of laughter. “Yes, you found it waiting for you on the doorstep when you got home, didn’t you?”

Some one had seen the forsaken umbrella and given it to a footman travelling to Berlin by the same train, who had left it at the Admiral’s house.

The Emperor always talks with great energy, and has a habit of thrusting his face forward and wagging his finger when he wishes to be emphatic. He has a very hearty, infectious laugh, and often stamps violently with one foot to show his appreciation of a joke. His characteristic attitude and manner of rocking incessantly from one leg to another and nodding his head as he talks make it easy to identify him in a crowd.

Sometimes he falls into Napoleonic attitudes, and occasionally attempts to pinch the ear of a particular friend.

On his face, whether grave or gay, stands out prominently the scar on his left cheek, made by the madman who once threw at him a piece of an iron bar. It is not a long scar nor very disfiguring, but the wound must have been fairly deep. An inch higher it might have done terrible mischief. It was dangerously near one of those bright blue, restless, twinkling eyes.

Sometimes, but not frequently, the Emperor talks of his mother, always in terms of affectionate pride and appreciation. Once at supper, discussing books, especially the books one loved as a child, His Majesty mentioned “Frank Fairlegh” as among the chief favourites of his youth.

“I always read it aloud to Mamma while she was painting,” he said, “and I shall never forget how we laughed over it together. Mamma laughed so much that she couldn’t go on painting when I read that part—you remember where George Lawless keeps jumping over a chair to work off the nervous excitement while he waits for an answer to his proposal of marriage——” and the Emperor describes to the assembled adjutants and ladies some of the humorous incidents of the book.

The late Empress Frederick has left her mark everywhere in the New Palace. One of the gentlemen who had belonged to her household remarked that she was never idle, but every evening after dinner would sit with her writing-pad on her knee planning out on paper some scheme, charitable or otherwise, which at the moment occupied her attention.

“Sometimes,” he said, “she would discuss with me some alteration or improvement till perhaps twelve o’clock at night, and in the morning at seven I would receive from her a written statement, with all the details and directions worked out—all in her own writing. She must have written it after I left.”

The gardens and grounds of the Palace were enlarged and beautified under her directions, and the grass under the trees planted with all kinds of wild flowers—campanulas, forget-me-nots, hepaticas and primroses, which still flourish profusely. They are called “Empress Frederick’s flowers” to this day by the gardeners.

On the wall of my sitting-room at the New Palace was a strange-looking memorial made in chocolate-painted wood, commemorating the death of her little son Prince Sigismund, who died at two years of age. There was the date of his birth and death, and a sort of bracket which held two ugly flower vases. The whole erection was in the worst possible artistic taste, a blot on the room and an eyesore. It also served to perpetuate the name of Sterbe-Zimmer or Death-room, always used by the housemaids in reference to this apartment, which was otherwise as gay and sunny as any in the Palace.

The Emperor is not unfailingly humorous and good-tempered, but has his human moments of irritability, and if he is angry or dissatisfied with anybody they are not long kept in doubt on the subject. Occasionally, like other people, he is unreasonable and expects impossibilities, but on the other hand, when his anger has passed, he is always willing to modify a hasty decision.

Once he went from New Palace to Berlin for one night, and the stable authorities did not think it necessary to take over the saddle-horses for that short period, so that when the next morning the Emperor gave orders for his horses to be ready in an hour’s time the adjutants felt uncomfortably anxious. They gave the order, and prayed Providence to interpose with a thunderstorm, but the weather remained unusually calm and beautiful. By great good luck, a horse-box was standing at the Wildpark station, close to the New Palace, and the horses and grooms were crammed into it and taken by special train to Berlin, the journey occupying half an hour. The Emperor had to complain that morning of the unusual slowness of his JÄgers in helping him to dress, of their inability to find his favourite riding-whip, of the deliberation with which they brought him what he needed.

“Are you all asleep this morning?” he demanded, unconscious of the deep-laid motive pervading this sluggishness.

One of the adjutants, of a resourceful turn of mind, bethought him of some plans for new barracks which His Majesty had not yet examined, and he managed to interpose these plans at the moment when the Emperor was about to descend the staircase to the courtyard, in which as yet no welcome clatter of hoofs was to be heard.

But at last the horses arrived, not conspicuously unpunctual. They had trotted rather more quickly than usual from the station along the Linden, but the Master of the Horse had saved his reputation for being “always on the spot when wanted.”

It is not a bed of roses to be Master of the Horse to the German Emperor. When the horses of the state carriage in which were seated Queen Alexandra and the Empress of Germany, frightened by the guns of the salute, refused to draw any farther, and threw the whole procession into momentary confusion, it was the unfortunate Master who had to bear the brunt of the blame. He was presented by the Kaiser to King Edward, whom he already knew, with the accompanying phrase “Here’s the man who made such a fearful bungle (hat sich blamirt) with his horses.”

Evidently the Emperor thinks it better to go straight to the point, and that a lingering agony is worse than prompt dispatch.

One of his characteristics is that he can explain everything to everybody; but there is one exception—the suffragettes. He has never been able to explain them. They baffle him entirely. At first he thought they were just disappointed spinsters, but in view of the number of married women in their ranks he was obliged to abandon this idea. Since then he has been groping in vain after a satisfactory solution.

Some of them have been on board the Hohenzollern—not uninvited ones, of course—but a few of the charming English and American ladies who come to Kiel for the yacht-racing, who have sat on his decks and drank his tea, have shocked His Majesty by revealing themselves as sympathizers with the feminist suffrage movement. The Emperor becomes inarticulate at such moments. He wants to know “what in heaven women want with a vote?”

“We are coming to Germany soon, Your Majesty,” smiled one fair lady, with the intrepidity of her sex; “we are going to help on the movement here.”

“Here! There is no movement here, and if you begin burning houses and horsewhipping people in Germany, what do you think the police will do? They won’t send you flowers and newspapers and let you go free two days afterwards. We deal with people differently here, I can tell you.”

It is of no use to explain to His Majesty the difference between militant and non-militant suffragists. This is a distinction too subtle for his mind, which sees them all tarred with the same brush, a menace to the peace of mankind, a clamorous nuisance, and a disturber of settled convictions and ideas.

“Women should stay at home and look after their children,” is his last word on the subject; and if some one points out the flaws in this remedy, as for instance the thousands of women who have no children either of their own or some one else’s to see after, he takes refuge in ridicule. He is quite sure that a vote is a desperately bad thing for women.

However, he allows women to be colonels, honorary colonels, in his army. The Empress, the Crown Princess, Princess Fritz, Princess August Wilhelm, and his young daughter each have their regiments, at the head of which on Parade days they ride in full uniform—though a long riding skirt is perhaps the least practical military garment that can be imagined.

The young Princess Victoria Louise, now the Duchess of Brunswick, received her colonelcy when only seventeen, a few days after her Confirmation, which was the formal ending of her schooldays—the day when German girlhood of whatever class renounces its childhood for ever.

“Confirmation!” said one rather “grumpy” gentleman of the court, a man of occasional cynical humour: “what does Confirmation mean? Why, for the boys it means henceforth permission to smoke cigarettes; for the girls, freedom to go to balls and parties—that’s what Confirmation means in Germany.”

At the Prussian Court it signifies something rather strenuous, and all Hohenzollern Princes and Princesses are strictly prepared for it some months beforehand by the Court Chaplain. It is considered to be a very solemn moment of their lives, and at the ceremony each one of them must read aloud before the assembled congregation a Glaubens-Bekenntniss or Confession of Faith, a declaration of their religious belief, written by themselves, together with their views of what that belief implies as to the guidance of their future lives. It is a very impressive, almost a painful ceremony, this effort of these unformed boys and girls to give expression to their idea of how to shape their future worthily.

The day before the Confirmation, the candidate is examined in religious knowledge by the Chaplain, the Emperor and Empress being the only other persons present.

All the near relatives come to the ceremony; and one very notable old lady was conspicuous at the confirmation of the Princess. This was the venerable widowed Grand-Duchess Louise of Baden—“Aunty Baden,” as she is known in the family.

Daughter of the old Emperor, sister of the Emperor Frederick, mother of the present Queen of Sweden, this grey-haired, straight-backed old lady is a true Hohenzollern in character, of decided opinions and a restless, energetic mind. She still pays frequent visits to Berlin, occupying a suite of rooms in the palace of her late father overlooking the Linden, where the blind of one window remains permanently drawn, reminding the passer-by of the old monarch who daily stood there—as he once laughingly remarked, “because ‘Cook’ says I am there and we mustn’t disappoint the tourists"—to salute the Castle guard as it passed up to its barracks.

“Aunty Baden” has no pity for modern nerves and modern fatigue. She belongs to the old school, to an age of tough fibre. At the opening of the Kaiser-Frederick-Museum, when a statue to the Emperor Frederick was also unveiled, this indomitable old lady examined everything with a fresh, vital curiosity which baffled fatigue, insisted on penetrating into every room, and studying the remotest Greco-Assyrian sculptures with the liveliest interest. Hardly a single scarab or the smallest picture escaped her notice.

When the Empress suggested that it was getting late, and that the crowd of Princes and Princesses who had assisted at the ceremony were very tired and hungry, she only turned with renewed zest to an adjoining gallery.

“Oh, here are a quantity of beautiful things! We must look at these before we go! See how interesting!”

Everybody else was bored to extinction and fainting for lack of sustenance, the time for luncheon being long passed; but the old lady continually made new discoveries, and was with the greatest difficulty at last induced by the Emperor to return to the Schloss.

On the Confirmation-Day of the Princess the Grand-Duchess appeared in the Friedens-Kirche—the Church of Peace, built in the lovely gardens of Sans Souci, where the Emperor and Empress Frederick lie buried—leaning on the arm of her nephew the Emperor William, who treats her always with the greatest devotion and respect.

She had laid aside the black dress she usually wears, and appeared clothed completely in creamy white, a long white veil falling behind almost to the hem of her dress.

All the old teachers and servants who had ever been connected in the slightest degree with the Princess were invited to the church. The old Sattel-Meister—long retired from service—who first placed her on her pony, her former tutors and governesses, as well as the Stifts-Kinder, grown up now and done with black uniforms and tight hair for ever—all were there.

The Lutheran service is extremely simple, and the Chaplain’s address and the reading of the “Confession” occupied the chief part of the time. In an hour it was over.

The Emperor was extremely pleased with the way in which his daughter acquitted herself.

“She is a chip of the old block, isn’t she?” he said proudly, talking about the way in which she read her Glaubens-Bekenntniss. “It was like a Kavallerie-Attacke"—the military comparison did not appear to

strike him as out of place—“so direct and forcible; couldn’t have been better.”

Perhaps the Emperor’s martial comment was caused by his knowledge that in four days’ time he proposed to make his daughter Colonel of the Second Hussars, stationed at Danzig, the regiment of which his mother, the Empress Frederick, had also been colonel. On the birthday of the Empress, October 22, the news was announced.

A rumour of the event had taken wind, but the strictest secrecy was enjoined, and the necessary saddlery and, still more important, the necessary feminine uniform had been all prepared, the latter without any “trying on.”

It took three maids, several ladies, and at the last moment the patient ministrations and advice of the Emperor’s Leib-JÄger, to get the Princess satisfactorily into that uniform.

It was fearfully tight under the arms and round the neck, and the new patent-leather boots pinched horribly, so that the radiant glow of satisfaction in the glory and honour of wearing it was tinctured with some pain and discomfort, for the day was unusually warm, almost oppressive, and the heavy cloth loaded with astrachan, the hot fur cap with its skull and cross-bones (the emblem which gives the regiment its name, the Toten-Kopf or Death’s-Head Hussars) combined with the cumbersome habit-skirt, weighted the Princess almost beyond endurance.

All the officers of the regiment had travelled from distant Danzig, a twelve hours’ journey, to be presented to their new colonel; and the Empress’s birthday table, with the usual dozen of new hats, received hardly any attention at all, every one being absorbed in the “new recruit” to His Majesty’s forces.

“She will ride at the head of the first regiment that invades England,” said the Emperor gaily to me.

“Yes, I hope so. Then we shall be delighted to see it,” was the only possible answer I could find.

“Oh yes! You will receive her with open arms, no doubt,” he laughed, but looked as though he were not quite sure of the matter.

But when his daughter the following year accompanied her parents to England for the unveiling of the Queen Victoria Memorial, although she did not arrive at the head of her regiment, she nevertheless managed to subjugate and be subjugated by that portion of England which came within her sphere of influence.

Her impressions of her week in London, a city she had expected to find wrapt in impenetrable fog, but which remained, with the exception of a few showers, bathed in sunshine all the time of her visit, were joyous in the extreme.

The soldiers, especially the Highlanders walking with that peculiarly characteristic, proud, delightful swagger, the rhythmic swing of their kilts, the skirl of their bagpipes, thrilled her with delight.

“Your soldiers are wonderful,” she said; “I never thought they were like that. Every private walks like an officer.”

She thought the “Military Tournament” the most delightful entertainment she had ever seen, and was intensely amused at “Arthur’s Arabs,” the soldiers of the regiment of Prince Arthur of Connaught, who, disguised in burnous and appropriate head-gear and jabbering a jargon of their own invention, interspersed with weird shrieks and gestures, imposed themselves on a portion of the unsuspecting British public as “the real article” from somewhere in the neighbourhood of Algiers, and accomplished their tent-pegging to the accompaniment of blood-curdling and ear-piercing yells.

When the Emperor and Empress went with the King and Queen to spend the afternoon at Windsor Castle, King George sent all the German servants and footmen, under the guidance of some of his own English servants, to see this same Military Tournament, at which they were much delighted—for, as a rule, it is very difficult for people in attendance on travelling royalties to get any but a very cursory glimpse of the countries where they are staying. They returned glowing with enthusiasm and full of interest in what they had seen.

“So etwas haben wir nicht in Deutschland” (We have nothing like that in Germany), said one Diener to me with a certain quaint surprise; “it is very amusing, very interesting; but what is the use of it? We should not let our army waste its time dancing quadrilles with four-horse guns.”

I explained to the best of my ability that the tournament was a charitable affair and helped to get money for soldiers’ orphans, also that the gun evolutions were really only a modification of real military tactics. He seemed hardly convinced, however, and, in spite of his loudly expressed pleasure in the spectacle, still continued doubtful as to its relative utility.

If one may judge from the occasional bits of gossip which float upwards from “below stairs,” rather humorous situations sometimes arise between the servants of royalty belonging to different nationalities. When King George and Queen Mary paid their last visit to Berlin, on the occasion of the marriage of the Emperor’s daughter, two English waiting-maids were taken for a drive in Potsdam by a kindly German maid anxious to show some polite attention to the visitors. She, however, complained bitterly on her return of the severely patriotic attitude of the two British ladies, who, whatever they were shown, compared it detrimentally to something else in England; and when the German pointed out, as a possible object of interest, the large hangar built for the accommodation of Zeppelin’s air-ship, ostentatiously turned away their heads and looked in another direction, finding nothing more gracious to say than that they were “very pleased that the air-ship had descended by mistake into French territory!” Happily such rigidly uncompromising souls are rarely found at Court.

From her earliest years, projects for the marriage of the Kaiser’s daughter had been continually discussed, and as she grew older every eligible prince in Europe—with the exception of the one she eventually married—was cited as a possible husband. The Kings of Spain and Portugal were for some time hot favourites; and when the former young monarch, before his marriage, paid a visit of several days to the New Palace, all the newspapers, taking no account of differences of age and religion, were naturally quite certain that they had run to ground the future bridegroom of the Princess, then only fourteen years of age.

The King was, in spite of the fact that he has no pretensions to beauty, an extremely attractive personality, and he and the Princess were the best of friends, having a similarity of tastes in jokes and a mutual passion for horses. When the King shot his first stag in the Wildpark he gallantly presented her with his Spruch or trophy of leaves, which remained as an ornament of her sitting-room until the announcement of his engagement to Princess Ena of Battenberg, when the Spruch, which had been disintegrating leaf by leaf, finally disappeared.

Of all possible marriages, that which the Kaiser’s daughter eventually made was the last that any one would have dared to prophesy, so utterly improbable did it appear. The Duke of Cumberland, father of the bridegroom, had from childhood been the implacable enemy of the Prussian Royal House and Government. All attempts of the Emperor to bring about a reconciliation had failed.

With almost monotonous regularity the newspapers would announce from time to time the approaching meeting of the Emperor with the Duke, and with equal certainty a paragraph would appear next day announcing the latter’s departure from the scene of the projected rendezvous “a few hours before His Majesty’s arrival.” The name of “The Vanishing Duke” became peculiarly appropriate, and the feud appeared to have settled down into that hopeless state where every effort at reconciliation has been exhausted, and nothing remains to be done.

Many brilliant statesmen and crowned heads had to retire baffled after frequent praiseworthy but ineffective efforts, until at last those two great factors in the affairs of the world, Death and Love, intervened.

The Duke’s eldest son, travelling in his motor-car through Germany on his way to the funeral of his uncle the King of Denmark, met his death by an accident in a lonely part of the road, lay for a time unrecognized, and then, his identity becoming known, the Emperor sent off his son, Prince Eitel Fritz, with instructions to render all possible help in the distressing circumstances. The body of the young prince for two nights remained in the little village church near the place where the accident happened, guarded by Prussian soldiers and the two sons of the Kaiser—for the Crown Prince, whose wife’s brother is married to a daughter of the Duke, was also sent by the Emperor to do what he could to soften the sad tragedy. They watched all night by the coffin and escorted it on its way to burial.

A few weeks afterwards, Ernest Augustus, the second son of the Duke, by his brother’s death become heir to the family feud, came on his father’s behalf to thank the Emperor for his sympathy and aid in their sorrow. For the first time in their lives he and the Kaiser’s daughter met, spent an hour or so in each other’s company, and then, his mission fulfilled, he departed again. But a new element had been introduced into the quarrel: so strong was the mutual attraction felt by the two young people for each other that, in spite of the short time of their meeting, in spite of the tremendous prejudices and difficulties in the way, they at last wore down the opposition and conquered the accumulated hate of years. What the most practised diplomats failed to achieve, this boy and girl accomplished, and at last, through many troubles, delays, and vexations, won their way to their hearts’ desire.

On the evening of the wedding of the Princess with Prince Ernest of Cumberland, now Duke of Brunswick, at the beginning of the historic Torch Dance which concludes the ceremonies, the radiant bride, taking her father by one hand and the Duke of Cumberland by the other, walked between them round the hall to the sound of the stately bridal music.

It was a happy symbol, the erstwhile enemies linked together by the Kaiser’s daughter, a visible sign of the alleviation, if not quite the ending, of a situation which had for long years galled and irritated the German people.

Now, with the departure of his youngest child, the last one left at home, the private life of the Kaiser’s Court has grown in these later days somewhat still and a trifle lonely. There is as yet no little girl among the children of the Crown Prince to take even partially the place of the one who has gone away, the one who was her father’s particular companion and pride.

The Bauern Haus is closed, the Prinzen Wohnung shut up.

“It is really quite sad,” wrote recently a lady of the Court, “to see all those apartments deserted and locked up, the curtains drawn across the windows, no movement or life where formerly there was so much. Christmas was strange indeed without our Princess. We all felt it like a shadow over the festivities. We seemed to feel that we were getting old.”

And the Emperor, who in his private friendships has undergone many disappointments and disillusions, becomes increasingly conscious of the soul solitude brought by advancing years.

Yet, though suffering from occasional moods of depression, he faces the future with confidence in the destiny of his house.

Among his later literary admirations Kipling’s poem

“If” holds first place. A copy hangs above his writing-table; he quotes it frequently to his sons, and translates it into terse and expressive German for the benefit of his adjutants. It embodies his own experience of Life, crystallizes his own aspirations. He too has always been anxious