The simplest fare was served in the royal household. Macaroni was one of the principal articles of diet, and a favorite dish of the King’s was raw onions, which he peeled with his fingers, declaring that contact with a knife gave them an unpleasant flavor. The Queen, however, never liked Neapolitan cooking and always had some substantial German dishes prepared for herself. She could not speak Italian correctly, but learned only the Neapolitan dialect, which she pronounced in a most dreadful way, with her broad German accent. In short, Ferdinand’s second wife was as unpopular as his first had been popular. She made no effort to win the love of the people and her homely, plebeian ways were little to the taste of the gay Neapolitans, who adored glitter and display of any sort. The King’s favorite recreation was driving. He went out every afternoon, taking some of his family and usually holding the reins himself. The royal equipage was always accompanied by a mounted escort, while horsemen were stationed along the route the King was to take, to detain all chance travellers until he had passed by, not as a mark of respect, but as a measure of precaution. Exemplary as this royal pair may have been from the standpoint of a private citizen, as far as the education of their children was concerned they were certainly not successful. The teachers they chose were almost exclusively bigoted Jesuits. Ferdinand wished his sons to be taught Latin, French, civil and administrative law, but they received no military training of any kind. Even sports and physical exercises were excluded from their plan of education, nor were they permitted to travel or acquire any knowledge of foreign lands or peoples. Ferdinand’s own education had been most imperfect. He read little or nothing himself and wrote his orders, even those pertaining to important affairs of state, on any scrap of paper that came to hand, sometimes even in the Neapolitan dialect. He regarded all writers and literary men with contempt as an inferior and objectionable race of beings—a curious mixture of pride and prejudice which he also displayed toward people of other nations. He called the English, fishmongers, the French, barbers, the Russians, tallow-eaters, etc. Austrians were the only foreigners of whom he ever spoke with any respect, and that was on his wife’s account. In his younger days he had possessed a fair share of the Neapolitan humor, but it soon degenerated into bitterness and sarcasm. The following anecdote of him is characteristic. Some public festival was being held in the square in front of the palace and the King was standing on a balcony with the Crown Prince, then still a child. Gazing down on the crowds below and thinking perhaps of the high position to which he would one day be called, the boy turned suddenly to his father with the question: “What could a King do with all these people?”