As we get into the carriage again our coachman says we must see the new statue. Accordingly, we drive through the town and halt before it in the square. It is very fine, glowing like gold from the mint. The king sits his charger well, and gazes majestically at nothing in particular: still, one must be a little critical, and we imagine the horse's tail is not quite right. But then is not the whisk of a tail in bronze almost impossible to conceive of? If the artist suffers no severer censure than that, he will probably call himself a happy man. The inscription on the pedestal of the statue reads, "From his grateful people." High and low have contributed to it, and gladly. "That was a man!" says our driver. He was a soldier under him, and knows. And in fact the old king seems to have been always doing something for the country, so that the gratitude is not without a cause. The inhabitants of Cannstatt have special reason to remember him kindly: he himself was grateful to them and showed it. In the troublous times of 1848 he was sadly in need of money: Ludwigsburg (another satellite of Stuttgart) refused it, while Cannstatt came up to the mark handsomely. The royal creditor never forgot that. He instituted the _Volksfest_ as a sort of memorial, and Cannstatt is proud and prosperous, while Ludwigsburg is like a city of the dead. So the coachman affirms; and once conversation is opened between us it flows without intermission. His head is over his shoulder all the way as we roll back to the city under the beautiful trees of the palace grounds. "If the old king had been living, Würtemberg would never have joined in the last war: he would have told Prussia to fight it out by herself." Apropos of the war, we ask what he thinks of Bismarck. He evidently thinks a great deal of him, though not perhaps in the generally accepted sense of that expression. He states as a fact that there _are_ limits, leaving it to us to understand that the chancellor of the empire has overstepped them. He declares further that a Prussian, and especially a Berliner, is always to him an obnoxious member of society through his insisting on knowing everything (except his own place) better than anybody else. "Now, there was the Prussian general before this last one," he continues, changing from politics to court-gossip (naturally, since 1870, military matters in Würtemberg flourish under Prussian auspices): "the first ball he went to at the palace he asked the queen to dance! _Our_ queen!! And then he took his whole family, and they sat in chairs that never were meant for them, so that the king had to say to him next day, "Mr. General, first come I, and then my ministers, and then this one, and then that one, and _then_ you." He went back to Berlin soon after. It is pleasanter to sit one's self down where one doesn't belong than to be set down by somebody else." Our driver chuckles, and then bursts out afresh, "Asking the _queen_ to dance!" He certainly has perfect faith in his