“Great sympathy has been aroused here by the sad condition of Baron Ernest Walburg, son of the late Archduke Ernest, the Emperor’s uncle, by a morganatic marriage with a tradesman’s daughter. His father gave him £2,000 a year while he lived, but these payments ceased on his death. Baron Walburg was an officer in the Austrian army, but he resigned his commission when he married a poor work-girl. He applied for an audience of the Emperor, who declined to see him. He then stopped the Emperor in the street at Buda-Pesth, and described his sad situation. His creditors had distrained on all his belongings, leaving the Baron, his wife, and six children absolutely destitute. The whole family of eight persons, seven of them having Habsburg blood in their veins, are now dependent on the public poor rate.” One of them, it was added, in a subsequent communication, obtained a situation as head-waiter in a café at Buda-Pesth. The story,[6] it must be admitted, does not display Francis Joseph in a sympathetic light; and there are several other stories of the same sort concerning which the same thing may be said. One observes him, as it were, drawn this way and that by his feeling that an Emperor—especially if he be a Habsburg—must draw the line somewhere, and his doubts as to the precise point at which he ought to draw it. Presumably, too, he draws it in different places on different occasions, relating the drawing of it, whether wittingly or unwittingly, to the state of his temper and affections. The Archduchess Maria Henrietta was, of course, well on the right side of it when she married Prince Gottfried zu Hohenlohe Schillingfurst; and so, though by no means so much as a matter of course, was the Archduchess Eleanor when she married Naval Lieutenant Alfons von Kloss. On the other hand, the Archduke Ferdinand Charles—nephew of the Emperor and brother to the Archdukes Otto and Francis Ferdinand—found himself decidedly on the wrong side of it when he announced his desire to marry Fräulein Czuber, daughter of a teacher of mathematics in the Technical High School of Vienna. [Footnote 6: The responsibility for the story rests with the Vienna correspondent of the _Daily Mail_. It was not contradicted.]