She consented, however, to receive him, and the old Prince, agitated and hollow-eyed, made his appearance. He had come, as a last hope of placating the new Kaiser, to ask the Empress to use what influence she could on his behalf with her son. The Empress listened in growing astonishment. At the end there was a short silence. Then she said, with emotion: "I am sorry! You, yourself, Prince Bismarck, have destroyed all my influence with my son. I can do nothing." In a sense, it must have been a moment of triumph. But how tragic are all the implications of the story! It was in my mind as I traveled to Windsor on November 18, 1898. The following letter was written next day to one of my children: D---- and I met at Windsor, and we mounted into the quadrangle, stopped at the third door on the right as Mrs. M---- had directed us, interviewed various gorgeous footmen, and were soon in Mrs. M----'s little sitting-room. Then we found we should have some little time to wait, as the Empress was just going out with the Queen and would see me at a quarter to 1. So we waited, much amused by the talk around us. (It turned, if I remember right, on a certain German Princess, who had arrived a day or two before as the old Queen's guest, and had been taken since her arrival on such a strenuous round of tombs and mausoleums that, hearing on this particular morning that the Queen proposed to take her in the afternoon to see yet another mausoleum, she had stubbornly refused to get up. She had a headache, she said, and would stay in bed. But the ladies in waiting, with fits of laughter, described how the Queen had at once ordered her phenacetin, and how there was really no chance at all for the poor lady. The Queen would get her way, and the departed would be duly honored--headache or no headache. As indeed it turned out.)