Education in Germany seems to be strictly standardized. At a certain age every child, be he prince or peasant, will be in a certain class, learning certain subjects; each year he will move a grade higher, or if he does not, the whole family will feel that some dreadful irretrievable disgrace has befallen it. The mother will creep about the house sighing and swallowing her tears, the father will wear a corrugated brow and perceive looming in the distance a son who is a _zwei-jähriger_, that is, who must give two years instead of one to military service, since he has not passed the necessary examination which reduces the term by twelve months. This is one of the most terrible things which can happen to a German household. Girls, though not coming quite under the same conditions, have to work just as hard as boys, and are quite as keen to be “_versetzt_"--to get their remove. So those first lessons of the Princess with that energetic cheerful young tutor who had such an excellent persistent method of teaching grammar and arithmetic, those studies abhorrent to the minds of many children, were followed by me with the greatest interest. That a child of the age of the Princess should be expected to say with scarcely a moment’s hesitation how much nineteen times eighteen make, or to multiply mentally 342 by 439, appears to the unmathematical mind almost unreasonable, yet the solution of these problems is an everyday feat in every German school. But the answers did not always follow as quickly as the tutor desired, and often the results were wrong, in which case one paralysing hour of arithmetic was followed by another. Sometimes--with great diffidence, for it was entirely outside the range of my duties--I would suggest to the tutor that the interposition of a history or geography lesson might make a salutary change and enable the perplexed child’s brain to recover its tone. The tutor always listened very politely to my expression of opinion, and, though obviously disagreeing, deferred to my desire, after carefully hinting to the Princess that it was a concession to feminine weakness of character--which made her very angry with me, and she would insist on having more arithmetic straight away. To any one who has studied German grammar, especially those terrible prepositions which are always lying in ambush to trip up the unwary, it is not necessary to dilate on its subtle sinuosities. One day at the end of a lesson the tutor, glowing from a vivid and rapid description and analysis of some of the more intricate German constructions, showing the malleability of the language and the tortuosity into which the pedantic mind of man, for his own base purposes, can twist it, turned to me from his pupil’s discontented, puzzled face, for corroboration of his own enthusiastic laudation. “_Nicht wahr_, Meess?” he said, as he closed his book. “Is not grammar one of the most beautiful, most interesting studies to which one can devote one’s mind?”