favourable impression in St. Petersburg. His Majesty asked how he came to know that. B. replied through a private letter; whereupon the Emperor desired to see it. B. at first did not wish to show it; but finally, yielding to further pressure, drew it out of his pocket. The Emperor, after he had read it, ordered the carriage to stop, and set down the Chancellor at his residence. It was evident from the foregoing that in my affair the Prince wanted to know--and in certain circumstances to alter, and probably to a great extent--whether I was in a position, and what I might perhaps be inclined to say about himself, and indeed generally. Hence Kröner’s proposition. In that case, however, I could not, as I had hoped, do a service to the truth and to history, and therefore could only write an empty book. I therefore informed Bucher I would tell Kröner that an alteration in my health would prevent me from carrying out our contract, and beg him to cancel it. This was done in a letter from Leipzig on the 11th of October; and I was relieved from that burden and anxiety. On the morning of the 5th of January, 1892, I again spent an hour with Bucher at his place in Berlin, and found him the same dear old friend. His hopeless feeling with regard to the “Memoirs” had only grown deeper since I saw him last. In the interval he had paid a further long visit to Friedrichsruh, where he remained till shortly before Christmas. He was to return again soon on the Prince’s invitation, although the gout in his hands had begun again on the previous Sunday to give him great trouble, and the outlook and condition of affairs in the Sachsenwald pleased him less than ever. “Thank your stars that you are not in my place with these ‘Memoirs,’” he said. “One’s work is in every respect void of profit and pleasure. One exhausts himself on an utterly hopeless task, which will yield nothing for history. It is not alone that his memory is defective, and he has little interest in what we have done--up to the present he has looked through very few of my packets--but he begins also intentionally to misrepresent even plain and well-established matters of fact and occurrences. He will not admit his own share in anything that has failed, and he will acknowledge no one to be of any consequence compared to himself, except perhaps the old Emperor (to whom he now, as a foil to the young Emperor, gives a much higher place than he is fairly entitled to) and General Alvensleben--I cannot say why--who concluded the treaty with Russia and commanded at Vionville. Falk also is now praised, perhaps because he fears he might otherwise retort with disclosures. (But of course these ‘Memoirs’ are not to be published at all.) He insists that he is in no way responsible for the Kulturkampf, that he did nothing to oppose Pio Nono’s views respecting the Infallibility, and just as little against Arnim’s mischievous ambition--although everybody knows the contrary to be the fact. As if he and his work did not