it placed in front of her palace at Corfu. Apparently the Hohenzollerns did not resent this, however, for the then Emperor of Germany was most attentive to her whenever she was travelling in that country. He always made a point of calling upon her with his wife and is said to have considered her one of the cleverest women he ever met. There were not many books that she cared for, but she loved to read her favorites again and again. Heine was the only one of the German poets whose works she understood and treasured. Neither Goethe nor Schiller appealed to her, nor did the modern French poets interest her, although she thought highly of Lamartine. In English she specially admired Shakespeare and Byron, Shakespeare indeed ranking only second to Heine in her affections. She made excellent translations of several of his plays and could repeat whole scenes from them by heart. “Hamlet” and “Midsummer Night’s Dream” were her favorites, and she had a painting of Titania and her lover with the ass’s head hanging in each of her palaces. “Our illusions are the asses’ heads that we all kiss,” she used to say. She wrote charmingly herself, and while on the long journeys that consumed so much of her time she would send long letters every week to her husband and children, containing brilliant descriptions of her travels, bits of poetry or translations, often illustrated with exquisite pen-and-ink or water-color sketches. These valuable souvenirs are all preserved in the Hofburg, together with what she called her “day-book,” a sort of diary covering many years. Chapter XVIII Daily Life of the Empress As time went on, the hereditary disease of the Wittelsbachs, now known as neurasthenia, which for generations had manifested itself in one form or another, became more and more pronounced in the Empress Elizabeth. Her passion for solitude, her aversion to mingling with people, and constant craving for change must certainly be regarded as inherited peculiarities, though she was more ill than was generally suspected. A complication of disorders together with neuritis made her later years a perpetual martyrdom, yet she bore her sufferings with a patience and fortitude that her physicians pronounced almost superhuman. It was a bitter sacrifice for her to give up her riding, but fortunately she was still able to take the walks and climbs that meant so much to her. Often, indeed, it was not so much the love of exercise as the effort to find relief in physical exhaustion from the sleeplessness that tortured her and secure the rest so necessary to her overwrought nerves.