But the Duke himself was a splendid example of uprightness, fairness, and justice. He belonged to one of the oldest reigning families in Europe. The Hohenzollern, and even the Hohenstaufen, were but of yesterday compared with the glorious ancestors of the Ascanian princes. They did not actually claim descent from Ascanius, the son of Aeneas, nor from Askenas, the grandson of Japhet, though some crazy genealogists may have done so; but there is no flaw in their pedigree from the present Duke to Albrecht the Bear, Markgrave of Brandenburg in 1134. Some people would probably say that he belonged to a _totemistic_ age. The Duke whom I knew, and who died in 1871, was the eighteenth successor of this Albrecht the Bear, and though his possessions had been much reduced in the course of centuries, he knew what was due from him to his name, and to the blood of his ancestors. He never forgot it. He was a tall and very handsome man, very quiet, very self-contained, particularly during the later part of his life, when his increasing deafness made any free intercourse between him and his friends and officials extremely difficult. He worked as hard as any of his ministers, and no wonder, considering that everything, whether important or not, had finally to be decided by him. As he had been much attached to my father, and as my grandfather was his president or prime minister, he took some interest in me when I was a boy at school in Dessau, and I can remember standing before him and looking up to him in his cabinet with fear and trembling, although nothing could be kinder than the handsome tall man with his deep voice and his slowly uttered words; he seemed to move in an atmosphere of his own, far removed from the life of his subjects. The ducal castle at Dessau was a grand old building, a quadrangle open in front, with turrets that held the staircases leading up to the reception rooms. Some of his ancestors had been highly cultivated men, who had travelled in Italy, France, and England, and had collected treasures of art, which were afterwards stored up in the old Palace (Schloss) at Dessau, and in several beautiful parks in the neighbourhood that had been laid out a hundred years ago after the model of English parks. The orange trees (Orangerie) in those parks and gardens were magnificent, and I do not remember having seen such an abundance of them anywhere else; but they suddenly began to wither and die, and even replanting them by their heads and letting the roots grow as new branches does not seem to have saved them. The Duke and his highly cultivated Duchess were the little gods of Dessau. They seemed to live on their own Olympus. Everything depended on them; everything, such as theatre, concerts, or any public amusements, had to be provided out of their private purse. No wonder that the people looked up to them, and that whatever they did was considered right, whatever they said was repeated as gospel.