So all the luggage had to be re-packed, and before evening we had retired from the chicken-pox, only to find that after all it had come with us--for the young Princess Alexandra of Schleswig-Holstein, who was staying at the Court, and had just become engaged to her cousin Prince August Wilhelm, the Emperor’s fourth son, fell ill of the complaint almost immediately; but we remained where we were and did not travel farther. Their Majesties were due to pay a visit to England in a few days’ time, and many telegrams passed between the two countries, the Prussian Court fearing to bring the chicken-pox with them, while the English one implored them to come all the same, as nobody there was the least afraid of it. The upshot was that the visit was paid, the Germans spending an apprehensive week in England, always on the alert for symptoms which happily never appeared. Some time afterwards, the Empress in discussing this outbreak of chicken-pox remarked that she had not been at all anxious about any one but the Emperor. It was entirely for his sake that the doctors had thought it well to move from Belle Vue. “No, not at all,” vehemently spoke His Majesty, who happened to overhear what his wife said. “I had chicken-pox long ago when I was a boy. I wasn’t at all afraid of it.” “But, Wilhelm!” said the astonished Empress, “I never knew. Why didn’t you say so then?” “Nobody asked me,” said the Emperor grimly; “the doctors ordered us off, and there was the end of it. They never told me that it was on my account. I thought that _you_ were afraid of it.” This is the kind of thing that is apt to occur when people try to be a little too tactful. “I don’t know,” said the Princess, “why we fly about so much trying to run away from various diseases; we must be always meeting and swallowing microbes.” In Berlin during the wet weather the Emperor with difficulty can get the exercise he needs. He has had a covered tennis-court built in the grounds of Mon-Bijou Schloss, a short five minutes’ walk from the palace on the Lust-Garten; and here, when the weather continued persistently rainy, His Majesty, in a frightfully overheated building, would play with any young officers who were fairly expert at the game. None of them appeared to enjoy the honour very much. The oppressive atmosphere, combined with the nervous apprehension natural to the occasion--the fear lest an unlucky ball, with the hideous perversity of inanimate dumb things, might perhaps rebound with force against the sacred person of His Majesty or, as sometimes happened, fall into the midst of the tea-table presided over by the Empress--paralyzed the hand of even the least imaginative lieutenant. “I feel all unstrung and frightened,” confided one of these unfortunate youths to me. “Supposing I happened to give His Majesty a black eye?” “But,” I objected, “nobody gets black eyes at tennis.”