unfortunate husband and father of the guilty pair as nearly as possible lost his comfortable position as Kastellan, while the son--a young man old enough to know better--was severely punished, and the wife fell into disgrace and was for a long time looked at askance by her colleagues in the castle. At the same concert, one of the chorus-singers went out of his mind. At all State concerts there is a long interval in the middle, when the Emperor and Empress move round among the invited guests, chatting to each in turn. Not till His Majesty commands is the signal given by a gentle roll on the drum for the concert to recommence. On this occasion, after a very short interval indeed, the drum was heard and everybody hurried back in some surprise to the red velvet chairs, from which they had risen to wander about and talk. The Emperor knew that “some one had blundered,” as he had given no order to continue; but perhaps not unwilling to have the proceedings curtailed, he let the mistake pass, and shortly afterwards returned to his place beside the Empress. But the person who had given the signal was a singer of the chorus, who for some time had been giving his friends cause for uneasiness. After drumming energetically for several minutes he fled from the Schloss, pursued by one of the pink-stockinged footmen as far as the courtyard gates, where the unfortunate man escaped in the darkness into the crowd of the street. The birthday of the Empress, which occurs in November, was always celebrated at the New Palace. The most striking among her presents were the dozen hats given by His Majesty, invariably chosen by himself. They were arranged on stands on the billiard-table of the room where the “birthday-table” was erected--a table beautifully enwreathed and garlanded by autumn leaves, intermixed with fruits, bunches of tiny red crab-apples, clusters of green and black grapes, small melons and gourds. It is a perilous business for any man to set out to buy a dozen hats for his wife without consulting her tastes and wishes on the subject, but the German Emperor is not a man to recoil from even such an enterprise. Though the hats were always very beautiful, and obviously the most expensive of their kind, they always raised, I found, certain doubts and queries in the mind of the feminine observer. Does any woman in the world, be she ever so much an Empress, really desire to have hats thrust on her by the dozen without any “trying on” or any of that delicious hovering between two decisions which makes hat-buying so thrillingly charming--above all, without reference to the costume with which the head-gear must be worn, whereof it should be the fitting corollary and completion?