The old legends of the “wild Junker,” however, still wander up and down the country, and one of them took a seat by me in the railway carriage at a station between Koeslin and Schlawe, in the form of a sturdy peasant. Among various other stories he told me that Bismarck, on one occasion, instead of having a rickety old building at Kniephof removed in the ordinary way, brought it down with cannon shot. A reader of a critical turn will probably inquire where he could have obtained possession of this piece of ordnance. I reply with the counter-question: Whether my honest peasant had not merely heard the sound though he did not see the shot fired? and whether the popular legend which speaks through him had not, in the obscure impulses of its creative activity, confounded the Minister Bismarck with the Junker? We all dwelt with the latter in an old and rickety house known as the “Germanic Confederation,” and that, indeed, as it could not be removed otherwise, he was forced to bring down with the cannon of Königgrätz (Sadowa). On the 17th of October, at 9.30 A.M., a cold, wet morning, which afterwards cleared up, I continued my journey to Varzin in a hired conveyance. We reached the village in about three hours, and another few hundred yards along the paved road brought us to the centre of a group of buildings which formed the principal courtyard of the Varzin country seat. The postilion wished to stop here. I told him, however, to drive further on to the inn, in order that I might change my clothes and send word of my arrival. I found quartered in this miserable hut some Berlin policemen, who kindly vacated their room for me, and reported my advent. After a while, their chief, a man with a long beard, whom I had met at Versailles, came back and said: “His Serene Highness begs you to come.” I had in the meantime pulled on a dress-coat which I had brought with me, and now drove back to the door of the house, where I was received by two servants, who took me and my travelling bag to a room on the first floor. It was a large and handsome chamber, divided into a sitting and bedroom by a curtain which reached to the ceiling. In a quarter of an hour I was called to lunch, which was laid in a salon downstairs. Here I met, at first, only Count Herbert, General Erkert, Geheimer-Regierungsrath Tiedemann, and a Miss Jenny Fatio, a Frenchwoman from Orb, in West Switzerland, who had been for years in the Prince’s service, and who now managed the house in the absence of his wife, who was taking the waters at Toelz.