‘The Kaiser’s most pronounced characteristic,’ said Baron Y---- one evening as we paced the promenade, ‘is his overweening vanity. His “ego” dwarfs his every other attribute, natural or acquired, and it is idle to try to understand what he is, what he does, what he stands for--and, incidentally, what the German people, in quite another sense, have to stand for--without taking that fact into consideration. It is the obsession of his own importance--I might even say his belief in his own omnipotence--that is responsible for his taking the so-called Divine Right of the Hohenzollerns more seriously, interpreting the term more literally, than any of his ancestors since Frederick the Great. It is his vanity that is responsible for his incessant shiftings of uniforms, for his posturings, his obvious attempts to conceal or distract attention from his shrunken arm. He is the most consummate master of stagecraft; indeed, the Fates spoiled a great producer of spectacles--one who would have eclipsed Reinhardt--to make, not an indifferent Emperor, but----’ The Baron checked himself and concluded with: ‘Perhaps I had best not say what I had in mind. Everything considered, however, I am convinced that it would have been better for Germany if William the Second had been stage-manager rather than Kaiser.’ Specific and intimate instance of the pettiness with which the Kaiser’s vanity occasionally expressed itself Baron Y---- gave me the following evening. I had been turning the pages of some of his German illustrated papers, and was unable to refrain from commenting, not only on the frequency with which the portrait of the Kaiser appeared, but also of the defiant ‘come-one-come-all’ attitude of all of those in which the War Lord appeared in uniform. The Baron laughed good-naturedly. ‘The Kaiser’s attitudinizings,’ he said, ‘never seem to strike the Prussians as in the least funny (they haven’t much of a sense of humour, anyhow): but we Bavarians have always taken them as quite as much of a joke as has the rest of Europe. Now this picture’ (he began turning the pages of ‘Ueber Land und Meer’ in search of it), ‘which is one of the most popular with the Prussians, we of Bavaria have always called “Ajax Defying the Lightning,” and I am going to tell you the history of it. ‘This picture is reproduced from one of several dozen almost identical photographs which have been taken of the Kaiser glowering into the emptiness of the upper empyrean from the vantage of a little basaltic crag which crops up at the forks of a road in one of the Imperial game preserves. I have always taken a sort of paternal interest in this apparently “to-be-continued-indefinitely” series of photographs, for it chanced that I was in the company of their central figure on the occasion when he discovered this now famous pedestal, and it was due to a suggestion of mine that he was enabled to turn his find to what he no doubt considers a most felicitous use.