I climbed with Von Stockhammern several flights of a wooden staircase; the tan and red bordered corded runaway reminded you of a church, as did the bare white walls, and you felt a solemn silence, accentuated by the jangling of the sword; and then turning with a last flight of steps, I saw above two guards in the uniform of the Hartschier Regiment, two white coated, blue trousered, plumed statues standing beside a wide entrance door. The click of presenting arms and the statues came to life, and passing between them we found ourselves in what was evidently an antechamber of the Audience Saal, a comfortably furnished room; the walls covered with small oil paintings. I remember a silk-stockinged, stooping doorman who wore black satin breeches, like a character that I had seen sometime in a French romantic play. He was standing with his hand upon the knob of two brown oaken doors as if awaiting a signal. Apparently it came, although I heard nothing, for suddenly the brown doors swung back, and I found myself gazing into the long high-ceilinged room, the Audience Saal, and in the middle of this room stood an elderly man, in the dress uniform of an officer in the Second Bavarian Infantry. The uniform was blue and red and braided with gold, and the man had a white beard and a wonderfully kind face. It was His Majesty King Ludwig of Bavaria. My first thought, as I walked towards him, was of how closely he resembled the picture I had seen of him in the gallery on Unter den Linden. But as I drew nearer, I saw that the picture had not caught the man. You were conscious of kind eyes smiling a welcome through silver spectacles. You instantly felt that kindness seemed to be a dominant note of his character, and you realized the intellectual power behind that wide, thoughtful forehead; and you saw a firm mouth and chin suggesting determination, kindness, brains, force, every inch a king! But somehow, had I not known he was a king, the military regimentals which he wore might have been a little incongruous; he impressed me as being the kind of man you might expect to see in the black coated garb of a professor; a man of great, grave and forceful dignity and learning, and utterly foreign to the popular American conception of a monarch. This impression was borne out a moment later, when as Staatsrat von Dandl came forward to present me, King Ludwig showed me a delightful courtesy. Casting court etiquette aside, he welcomed me in true American fashion, his hand outstretched. There began then the usual preliminaries to a conversation and while we exchanged greetings, I noticed that His Majesty was wearing a great number of minor orders, strung in a bright ribboned line across his chest, and beneath them, on the left side, the Iron Cross, the Star of St. Hubertus, and the Order of the Crown. Presently, in a pleasantly modulated voice, King Ludwig told me that through his people he had long felt a great friendship for America.