“For a long time my heart had been swelling. I could not restrain my tears at hearing all these indignities. ‘Why do you cry?’ said he. ‘Ah! ah! I see that you are in low spirits. We must dissipate that dark humor. The music waits us. I will drive that fit out of you by an air or two on the flute.’ He gave me his hand and led me into the other room. I sat down to the harpsichord, which I inundated with my tears.” On the fourth day after the arrival of the Crown Prince at Baireuth, a courier came with a letter from the queen conjuring him to return immediately, as the king was growing worse and worse. Frederick immediately hastened to Potsdam, and on the 12th of October entered the sick-chamber of his father in the palace there. He seems to have thought nothing of his wife, who was at Berlin. We have no evidence that he wrote to her during his absence, or that he visited her upon his return. For four months the king remained a great sufferer in Potsdam, trembling between life and death. It was often with great difficulty that he could breathe. He was impatient and irritable in the extreme. As he was rolled about in his Bath chair, he would petulantly cry out, “Air! air!” as if his attendants were to blame for his shortness of breath. The distress from the dropsy was very great. “If you roll the king a little fast,” writes an attendant, “you hear the water jumble in his body.” The Crown Prince was deeply affected in view of the deplorable condition of his father, and wept convulsively. The stern old king was stern to the end. He said one day to Frederick, “If you begin at the wrong end with things, and all go topsy-turvy after I am gone, I will laugh at you out of my grave.” Quite unexpectedly, the latter part of January the virulence of the king’s complicated diseases of gout, dropsy, and ulcers seemed to abate. Though but forty-seven years of age, he was, from his intemperate habits, an infirm old man. Though he lingered along for many months, he was a great sufferer. His unamiability filled the palace with discomfort.