A miracle! A freak of fancy! He goes on his way. People look at him, but he looks at nobody, looks straight ahead through the crowd, with something of the air of a woman who knows that she is being looked at. People greet him; he returns the greeting, heartily and yet distantly. He seems not to walk very easily; it looks as if he were not much accustomed to the use of his legs, or as if the general attention he excites bothers him, so irregular and hesitating is his gait; indeed, at times he seems to limp. A policeman springs to attention, a smart woman, coming out of a shop, smiles and curtseys. People turn round to look at him, nudge each other, stare at him, and softly whisper his name.... It is Klaus Heinrich, the younger brother of Albrecht II, and heir presumptive to the throne. There he goes, he is still in view. Known and yet a stranger, he moves among the crowd--people all around him, and yet as if alone. He goes on his lonely way and carries on his narrow shoulders the burden of his Highness! I THE CONSTRICTION Artillery salvos were fired when the various new-fangled means of communication in the capital spread the news that the Grand Duchess Dorothea had given birth to a prince for the second time at Grimmburg. Seventy-two rounds resounded through the town and surrounding country, fired by the military in the walls of the "Citadel." Directly afterwards the fire brigade also, not to be outdone, fired with the town salute-guns; but in their firing there were long pauses between each round, which caused much merriment among the populace. The Grimmburg looked down from the top of a woody hill on the picturesque little town of the same name, which mirrored its grey sloping roofs in the river which flowed past it. It could be reached from the capital in half an hour by a local railway which paid no dividends. There the castle stood, the proud creation of the Margrave Klaus Grimmbart, the founder of the reigning house in the dim mists of history, since then several times rejuvenated and repaired, fitted with the comforts of the changing times, always kept in a habitable state and held in peculiar honour as the ancestral seat of the ruling house, the cradle of the dynasty. For it was a rule and tradition of the house that all direct descendants of the Margrave, every child of the reigning couple, must be born there.