He is, as every one knows, a young man who has devoted much time to sport, and, like his father, has many spheres of activity, having written a book, visited India, and made some good and a few unwise speeches. He is an ardent soldier and a typical Hohenzollern, with supreme confidence in the star of his family, and earnestly desires to live his life in his own way, to move with the times, to be a child of his century; and it is probable that with a little more experience of life, especially perhaps of that discipline of sorrow which initiates most men into a new sphere of thought, he will develop into the man the world hopes to see in him--something steadfast and strong, and perhaps a little more silent. At present he is very good-natured, very kind, very crude in his ideas, very young for his age, very self-confident and rather selfish, as the modern type of young man is apt to be. He is popular in Potsdam, where he picks up little boys for rides on his charger as he comes home from drill, flings gold pieces abroad to poverty-stricken people, gives lifts in his motor-car to weary men on the road. He has all that facile, democratic, easy generosity which wins popularity, and possesses great charm of manner together with a hatred of coercion and restraint. Probably some recent outbreaks have been due to a desire to show his independence of mind, a yearning to cast off conventional shackles and to say what he thinks. He still has a good deal of the schoolboy in his composition, although since his marriage he has given up his favourite pastime of sliding down staircase banisters. But it is not so long since, when he and his family were living in the Stadt-Schloss at Potsdam, one wet day when entertainment was hard to find, he had the happy idea of amusing his children by taking their tiny Shetland pony upstairs to the nursery. The pony had first to be fetched by the Crown Prince and his adjutant from the stables of the Marmor Palais, and was with difficulty dragged and pushed into the automobile, where, in a state of abject terror, it protested all the way against its abduction. When they arrived at the Stadt-Schloss the pony was led or rather hauled bodily up the stairs, and was so unnerved by its experiences that its behaviour on arriving in the nursery scared the little princes into tears, and they begged for the pony to be taken away again, howling without intermission until the poor animal was, with difficulty, removed. CHAPTER XV CONCLUSION The Emperor William has a great horror of every possible kind of infection, especially of the ordinary cold. Unhappy officials summoned to Court while suffering from this minor ailment may be seen using surreptitious pocket-handkerchiefs behind the kindly shelter of a palm, or slipping through the window on to the terrace to indulge in the inevitable sneeze out of range of His Majesty’s observation.