And this man is probably one of the "Four Kings" she was to be asked by? A Swedish Officer, with some skill in palmistry, many years ago, looked into her innocent little hand, and prophesied, "She was to be in terms of courtship, engagement or as good as engagement, with Four Kings, and to wed none of them." Wilhelmina counts them in her mature days. The FIRST will surprise everybody,--Charles XII. of Sweden;--who never can have been much of a suitor, the rather as the young Lady was then only six gone; but who, might, like enough, be talked of, by transient third-parties, in those old Stralsund times. The SECOND,--cannot WE guess who the second is? The THIRD is this August the dilapidated Strong. As to the SECOND, Wilhelmina sees already, in credulous moments, that it may be Hanover Fred, whom she will never marry either;--and does not see (nor did, at the time of writing her _Memoires,_ "in 1744" say the Books) that Fred never would come to Kingship, and that the Palmistry was incomplete in that point. The FOURTH, again, is clearly young Czar Peter II.; of whom there was transient talk or project, some short time after this of the dilapidated THIRD. But that too came to nothing; the poor young lad died while only fifteen; nay he had already "fallen in love with his Aunt Elizabeth" (INFAME CATIN DU NORD in time coming), and given up the Prussian prospect. [He was the Great Peter's Grandson (Son having gone a tragical road )]; Czar, May, 1727--January, 1730: Anne Iwanowna (Great Peter's Niece, elder Brother's Daughter), our Courland friend with the big cheek, succeeded; till her death, October, 1740: then, after some slight shock of revolution, the Elizabeth just mentioned, who was Daughter of the Great Peter by his little brown Czarina Catherine whom we once met. See Mannstein, _Memoirs of Russia_ (London, 1770), pp. 1-23, for some account of Peter II.; and the rest of the Volume for a really intelligent History of this Anne, at least of her Wars, where Mannstein himself usually had part. All which would be nothing, or almost less, to Wilhelmina, walking fancy-free there,--were it not for Papa and Mamma, and the importunate insidious by-standers. Who do make a thing of it, first and last! Never in any romance or stage-play was young Lady, without blame, without furtherance and without hindrance of her own, so tormented about a settlement in life;--passive she, all the while, mere clay in the hands of the potter; and begging the Universe to have the extreme goodness only to leave her alone!--