There was another very faithful friend, of humbler station still, whose heart the Prince managed to capture by his genial affability and the kind interest which it was his wont to manifest in others. Nobody could have stayed any time in Bonn at that particular period without becoming acquainted with "Appeltring"--or, as she was more ceremoniously called to her face, "Frau Gevatterin." She was, without question, the most popular "character" in Bonn, and there was no man who had not a kind word for her, and was not ready to test her well-known power of repartee by a little joke. "Appeltring," of course, means "Apple-kate"--"Tring" standing for Katherine by one of those extraordinary transformations of names which, probably, not even Grimm could explain, and which in the Rhenish dialect convert "Heinrich" into "Drickes," and "Reinhard" into "Nieres." She was an apple-woman, as her name implies, or, rather, a seller of fruit generally, and had her stall or tent just outside the Neuthor, close to the Prince's quarters, and on a spot which he must pass several times almost every day--a coign of vantage, moreover, from which all the fashionable and unfashionable world taking the air in the Poppelsdorfer Allee, might be surveyed, as can all the fine folk passing in and out of Hyde Park from Hyde Park Corner. She was on that spot still when I was at Bonn twenty-three years later, and she was there for some time after--a weather-bronzed, wrinkled old woman then, but still full of chat and lively talk, humour and repartee, and endowed with a truly encyclopædic knowledge of everyone who had been anyone at Bonn, and of his life, and failings, and little adventures. Even in the Prince's day she was decidedly past her first youth, and devoid of personal attractions; but she had still something of the halo about her then of a not very distant serio-comic little love affair, about which she was made to hear no end of chaff--with a trumpeter (named Bengler, if I recollect right) who lost his life in that Russian war in which the great Moltke won his first spurs. During all the time that she offered her wares outside the Neuthor her stall was a favourite resort with folk who had a spare quarter of an hour on their hands, some of them of the best blood. The Emperor Frederick has sat on that spot many a time, watching the passers-by, and exchanging chat with "Tring," while eating cherries from one of the shallow flat-bottomed baskets in which "Frau Gevatterin," or her younger assistant, served them from the tent; and so have the Coburg Princes, more particularly Prince Albert, who had a peculiar liking for "Appeltring" and her quaint ways, her good temper, and her ready answers. Barring the Princes, "Tring's" customers were not always prompt paymasters. This necessitated the keeping of accounts, which, as "Tring" was nothing of a penwoman, resulted in a description of bookkeeping so curious as to induce a learned archæological