As an administrative officer the young sovereign was inexorable and heartless in the extreme. Those who had befriended him in the days of his adversity were not remembered with any profusion of thanks or favors. Those who had been in sympathy with his father in his persecution of the Crown Prince encountered no spirit of revenge. Apparently dead to affection, and oblivious of the past, the young sovereign only sought for those agents who could best assist him in the work to which he now consecrated all his energies--the endeavor to aggrandize the kingdom of Prussia. Poor Doris Ritter received but a trivial pension for her terrible wrongs. Lieutenant Keith, his friend and confederate in his contemplated flight, who had barely escaped with his life from Wesel, after ten years of exile hastened home, hoping that his faithful services and sufferings would meet with a reward. The king appointed him merely lieutenant colonel, with scarcely sufficient income to keep him from absolute want. Perhaps the king judged that the young man was not capable of filling, to the advantage of the state, a higher station, and he had no idea of sacrificing his interests to gratitude. Ten years later the king made poor Keith a present of a purse of gold, containing about seven thousand dollars, under circumstances which reflected much credit upon the donor. In the following quaint style Carlyle records the incident: “The king did a beautiful thing to Lieutenant Keith the other day--that poor Keith who was nailed to the gallows, in effigy, for him at Wesel, long ago, and got far less than he expected. The other day there had been a grand review, part of it extending into Madame Knyphausen’s grounds, who is Keith’s mother-in-law. “‘Monsieur Keith,’ said the king to him, ‘I am sorry we had to spoil Madame’s fine shrubbery by our manœuvres; have the goodness to give her that, with my apologies,’ and handed him a pretty casket with key to it, and in the interior 10,000 crowns. “Not a shrub of Madame’s had been cut or injured. But the king, you see, would count it £1500 of damage done, and here is acknowledgment for it, which please accept. Is not that a gracious little touch?” One wretched man, who had been the guilty accomplice of the Crown Prince in former scenes of guilt and shame, was so troubled by the neglect with which he was treated that he hanged himself.