‘And so,’ continued Baron Y----, ‘the obscuring limb was removed, and the mutilated tree, as I knew it must, went down the following winter. “My look-out now will have three hours of sunlight instead of one,” the Kaiser observed gleefully when he told me about it; “I was glad to see it go.” ‘It was a case of one monarch against another, and as the Kaiser is resolved to brook no rival, especially where the question of his “sunlight” is concerned, I suppose the sequel was inevitable. All the same I am sorry that--that it was the monarch of the forest that had to go down. But though the tree went down,’ he concluded with a grimace, tossing the magazine into my lap, ‘the “Ajax” pictures still continue.’ ‘Wouldn’t “His Place in the Sun” be even an apter title than “Ajax Defying the Lightning”?’ I ventured. ‘Unquestionably,’ was the reply. ‘I had thought of that myself. But, you see, even we Bavarians are very keen in the matter of the extension of Germany’s “_übersee_” colonies, and it wouldn’t do to make light of our own ambitions.’ I have set down this little story just as it was told to me, and it is only since the outbreak of the war, when the mainsprings of German motives are revealed at Armageddon, that it has occurred to me how perfectly it resolves itself into allegory. To the world at large, but to the Briton especially, is there no suggestion in what the Kaiser _did_ to the tree, which for a hundred years or more had shadowed his tardily stumbled-upon look-out, of what he _planned to do_ to the Empire which he had so often intimated had crowded him out of his ‘place in the sun’? With the tree he hewed off a sun-obscuring limb, and the unbalanced, mutilated remnant succumbed to the first storm that assailed it. Was not this the procedure that he reckoned upon following with the ‘obscuring limbs’ of the British Empire? The foregoing instance of the extravagant vanity of the Kaiser Baron Y---- told more in amusement than in censoriousness, but I recall another little story to much the same point that he related with hard eyes and the shade of a frown, as one man speaks of another who has not quite ‘played the game’ in sport or business. It, also, had to do with an imperial hunt.