'You never can tell,' he said to Wilhelmine, 'whether they will be most frightened at the four eagles' (there were two black and two white) 'swirling about their heads, or at the black bears which come tumbling towards them! It is always one or the other, and sometimes it is both; and, anyhow, it is great fun.' But in the year 1727, when Fritz was fifteen, these pleasant things came to an end. No more Wustershausen or Berlin; no more talks with his sister in the childish language they had invented for themselves, no more fishing expeditions to the ponds in the sandy moor that surrounded the palace. The crown prince was major now of the Potsdam Grenadiers, and we may be quite sure that the king never suffered him to neglect his work. Dressed in a smart uniform covered with gold lace, he was to be seen at every muster and every review, leading his men; but, even now, the boy who, thirty years later, was to prove one of the three greatest generals of his century, had no love for war, and would hurry back to Potsdam to exchange his uniform for a loose dressing-gown, and the duties of drilling for a practice on the flute. In this year, too, an event happened which had a great influence on the home life of both Fritz and his sister. This was the sudden death of George I. on his way to Hanover, without his having obtained the consent of Parliament to the Double-Marriage Treaty, which the queen of Prussia, Sophia Dorothea, had hoped to have obtained four years earlier. The new king of England, George II., had no particular love for his brother-in-law of Prussia, and for his part Frederick William, though at that time he desired the marriages quite as much as his wife, amply returned his feelings. At length the repeated delays drove him nearly out of his mind with fury, and he vented his anger on the queen (who would have suffered any humiliation rather than give up her project) and on the prince and princess. Henceforth the life of the royal family was made up of violence on the one part and deceit on the other. People began to take 'sides,' and the quarrel between father and son grew worse daily.