After having spent Christmas with my family in Wiesbaden, I went to Berlin. I wrote a note to Lothar Bucher, whom I had last seen sixteen years before as a fellow refugee in London, and whom I wished very much to meet again. Bucher answered promptly that he would be glad indeed to see me again, and asked if I would not like to make the acquaintance of "the Minister" (Bismarck), who had expressed a wish to have a talk with me. I replied, of course, that I should be happy, etc., whereupon I received within an hour an invitation from Count Bismarck himself (he was then only a count) to visit him at eight o'clock that same evening at the Chancellor's palace on the Wilhelmstrasse. Promptly at the appointed hour I was announced to him, and he received me at the door of a room of moderate size, the table and some of the furniture of which were covered with books and papers,--evidently his working cabinet. There I beheld the great man whose name was filling the world--tall, erect, and broad-shouldered, and on those Atlas shoulders that massive head which everybody knows from pictures--the whole figure making the impression of something colossal--then at the age of fifty-three, in the fulness of physical and mental vigor. He was dressed in a General's undress uniform, unbuttoned. His features, which evidently could look very stern when he wished, were lighted up with a friendly smile. He stretched out his hand and gave me a vigorous grasp. "Glad you have come," he said, in a voice which appeared rather high-keyed, issuing from so huge a form, but of pleasing timbre. "I think I must have seen you before," was his first remark, while we were still standing up facing one another. "It was some time in the early fifties on a railway train from Frankfort to Berlin. There was a young man sitting opposite me who, from some picture of you which I had seen in a pictorial paper, I thought might be you." I replied that this could not be, since at that period I was not in Germany. "Besides," I added--a little impudently perhaps--"would you not have had me arrested as a malefactor?" "Oh," he exclaimed, with a good, natural laugh, "you mistake me. I would not have done such a thing. You mean on account of that Kinkel affair? Oh, no! I rather liked that. And if it were not that it would be highly improper for His Majesty's minister and the Chancellor of the North German Confederacy, I should like to go with you to Spandau and have you tell me the whole story on the spot. Now let us sit down." He pointed out to me an easy-chair close to his own and then uncorked a bottle which stood, with two glasses, on a tray at his elbow. "You are a Rhinelander," he said, "and I know you will relish this." We touched glasses, and I found the wine indeed very excellent.