After luncheon the boys, including the Prince, who was then about fifteen, all went with me down to the “island” which lay in the lake, and where farming operations on a small scale were carried on. A long narrow road led to the island, which was really a peninsula, and there everybody, including the Prince and myself, engaged in the occupation--it being the season of potato harvest--of digging potatoes out of the ground and gathering them into heaps. The coachman and footman and a young officer, a sort of deputy-governor, all assisted in this work. Some geese came along and gobbled up the stray small potatoes we threw in their direction, and the sun, reflected from the lake in front, shone brightly on us as we toiled, girt round with potato-sacks to keep our clothes clean. This participation in agricultural pursuits is a part of the training devised by the Governor, but, as he himself was not an agriculturist, I doubt whether it was really as beneficial as it might have been. The propagation and development of seeds, the rearing of young animals, and the study of their wants, would, I think, have been less monotonous than this incessant potato gathering, which we pursued nearly every afternoon while I was there. At five, when the afternoon train to Kiel was seen in the distance, we took off our sack-aprons and went home to tea, and I was free for an hour or so, when I gave an English lesson to the whole class of boys, which nearly always also included their Governor and the officer from the _Schule_ who was teaching them English, a very pleasant, kind young man, who sat humbly (metaphorically speaking) at my feet and was anxious to learn all he could. They had been reading Dickens’ “Christmas Carol"--everybody in Germany reads Dickens, and gets quite a wrong idea of present-day English life from his books--but I produced Conan Doyle’s “Adventures of Brigadier Gerard,” as being in my opinion more suitable for boys, as well as more colloquial and military in tone. I never had a class which hung so much on my words before. As they all spoke with a very bad accent, I read to them myself, so that they could hear English, and then we discussed the story and the meaning of obscure words and phrases. They were very alert and intelligent, and soon became deeply absorbed in the “Brigadier.”