But these two, as I said, Lang and Masset, were our special friends, we always felt so safe and sure with them, as if no danger could harm us. I should never stop, if I began relating everything, the fatherly way in which they took care of us, how often they carried us in their arms, all they did to please us, when we were quite small. For I was only two years old, when, the Rhine being frozen over for the first time for many years, they carried us across, my little brother and myself, in order that we might have a recollection of the unusual occurrence. And I do remember it quite distinctly, and many another little incident of like nature. I cannot think of these without emotion, but there was very much also that had its purely comic side. Whilst we were staying in Baden, later on, installed in the simplest, most modest fashion, with very few servants, some one happened one day to ring at the front door, just at the moment when Masset was summoned to my father. “Let me go,” I said; “I will open the door!” But very firmly though gently, I was pushed on one side. “No, dear child,--that cannot be, that would never do!” I was eighteen at the time, but for both Lang and Masset I always remained a child. One amusing little scene, though it has not to do with them, but with another old servant, I cannot help relating here. In my mother’s bedroom hung a lamp with a pink shade, giving a very agreeable light whenever it chose to burn, but more often than not a source of infinite trouble and annoyance. Now-a-days with the comfort and convenience of electricity or even of ordinary petroleum lamps, people can little imagine the nuisance of the old-fashioned oil-lamps. Two or three times in the course of an evening they had to be wound up with a sort of big key--and even then they would not burn! All the same everyone was agreed as to their being a most admirable invention! One evening when my poor little invalid brother was being put to bed, as he happened for once to be free from pain, my mother came away and joined us others at the tea-table. For she felt safe in leaving Otto to the care of his devoted attendant, a very old man, quite a relic of the past, as he had been in my grandmother’s service and had been handed on to us. Suddenly the door opened, and a wrinkled old face, crowned with snow-white hair, peeped in.--“Your Highness, the lamp is going out!” My mother jumped up. To rush into the other room, pull down the lamp, and carry it outside before its feeble light was entirely extinguished and had poisoned the atmosphere with its fumes--all this was the work of an instant. But how we all laughed! till the tears ran down our cheeks. And we were laughing still when my mother came back to the tea-table, quite astonished at our merriment, and asking its cause. To her it had seemed just the most natural thing in the world that the old servant should appeal to her, and that she should run to his assistance.