Not all of them, of course, are true; and we will hope that the more malicious stories are false. The story, for instance, that Francis Joseph, taking part in a _battue_ in the midst of the troubles of 1866, asked an aged peasant for a light for his pipe, and was told the aged peasant’s candid opinion of Emperors who amused themselves by pursuing game when their subjects were dying for them on the stricken field, is probably the invention of a political malcontent. A more agreeable story—and one at which the Emperor himself may chuckle—is that of his encounter with the farmer who took him for an ordinary trespasser and threatened that, if he did not clear off his land at once, he would first shoot him in the posterior parts as a mark of identification and then inform the police; and he is, no doubt, as pleased as his people are to remember how he once arrested poachers with his own hand in one of his own parks, and having satisfied himself of the truth of their representation that they were honest old soldiers who had come to poverty through no fault of their own, gave orders that they should be given appointments as gamekeepers. A ruler of whom stories of that last kind are told never fails to be popular with the sporting classes of the community; and the parade of gamekeepers from all parts of the Empire, which was one of the most picturesque features of Francis Joseph’s Jubilee celebrations, impresses one as a most proper sequel thereto. These stories, however, though necessary to atmosphere, are only incidental. It is enough to glance at them, just as it is enough to glance at the story of those world-wide wanderings of the Empress which began, long before she had provided Frau Schratt to “entertain” the Emperor during her absence, with her sudden departure for Madeira, in 1860. Legend has crystallised round that departure: it has been called a “flight,” and attributed to the cumulative effect of three distinct domestic disturbances. First of all, we are told, there was a disturbance caused by the terrible Archduchess Sophia, who would not allow the Empress to bring up the infant Crown Prince in her own way: a trouble which may have been bitter at the time, in spite of Countess Marie Larisch’s assurance that the matter presently became one of absolute indifference to her. In the second place, we are informed, there was a disturbance because Francis Joseph made too public a display of his affectionate regard for a certain Fräulein Roll, of one of the Viennese theatres; and finally, if the reports may be trusted, the quarrel reached its climax because Francis Joseph suffered himself to be fascinated by a peasant girl whom he met when out shooting.