I first saw her at Bornstedt, where I had come to fetch my little Princess, who had been spending the afternoon with her aunt. The carriage I was in drove past a big farmyard, where waggon-horses were being harnessed, up to the door of a big stone house pleasantly shaded by chestnut trees. As I got out of the carriage a sudden irruption of screaming children, boys and girls of all ages in a state of extreme heat and untidiness, among whom I recognized my Princess, burst from the dark doorway of a cow-house, and trampling and stumbling over heaps of farmyard litter, fled with shrieks up a perpendicular ladder into a hay-loft. They were followed at a short interval by a lady clad in a tweed skirt, a striped blouse and a Panama hat, who likewise flew up the ladder with remarkable agility and disappeared. Uproarious screams were presently heard issuing from the loft. They were evidently playing _Versteckens_, and my coachman confided to me that the lady of the ladder was Princess Féodora herself. The Princess disliked the ordinary court circle, with its cramped, narrow views, and loved to surround herself with clever, unconventional people, whatever their rank in life. With her it was a positive obsession that all her royal nephews and nieces should know life as it really was, not as seen blurred and transformed through a court atmosphere, with the hideous, ugly realities of existence hidden away and covered up. She taught them many perhaps disagreeable truths about themselves, which they would have heard from no one else. The trend of modern thought and contemporary politics both found in her an earnest and intelligent student. With poverty, with humble folk, she had an intense sympathy, a passionate tenderness for all simple struggling existences. Although possessing a conspicuous sense of humour, in her books she wrote only of the sombre side of life, the bare starving sand-dunes of her native Holstein, the resinous breath of its pine-woods, the chill sad beat on the shore of its grey sea-waves. She depicted the strenuous toil, the unrelieved labour, the sordid existence and struggles of the peasantry. “The only truths in life,” she makes one of her characters say, “are founded upon Work. Everything else is false.” In “Tante Féo’s” company the little Princess had the privilege of seeing the first aeroplane flight of her life made by Orville Wright, who had installed himself and his machine on the Bornstedter Feld, where he was instructing the German officers in the art of flying.