The time has come to speak of these sorrows; and the black series began, curiously enough, in the very year in which Francis Joseph achieved his most signal triumph as a ruler. It was in 1867, as we have seen, that he pulled his Empire out of the fire after the disaster of Sadowa, conciliated Hungary, and was crowned with gorgeous and impressive ceremony in the Buda Cathedral. It was also in 1867 that his brother, the Archduke Maximilian, was shot for pretending to be Emperor of Mexico; and that execution was the first of the series of tragedies which never fail to strike one as due to happen in fulfilment of Countess Károlyi’s curse. Since we have come to the theme, we must have the text of that curse before us once again: the curse of a mother whose son had forfeited his life as a rebel:— “=May Heaven and Hell blast his happiness! May his family be exterminated! May he be smitten in the persons of those he loves! May his life be wrecked, and may his children be brought to ruin!=” And now let us set beside that curse a newspaper cutting, taken from one of the Vienna journals at the time of the assassination of the Empress Elizabeth. It is a bald summary, headed “The Sorrows of the House of Habsburg,” and it runs thus:— “On January 30, 1889, Crown Prince Rudolph took his own life in his hunting-box at Meyerling. In May, 1897, Sophie, Duchess d’Alençon, at one time the affianced bride of Ludwig II. of Bavaria, was burnt to death, in Paris. On June 16, 1867, the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, the Empress’s brother-in-law, was shot by a firing-party at Queretaro. His consort, the Belgian Princess Marie-Charlotte, lost her reason, and has been, for the last thirty years, under restraint at the Château of Bouchout. Archduke William Francis Charles died, in the summer of 1894, at Baden near Vienna, from injuries sustained through a fall from his horse. Archduke John of Tuscany, who had resigned his rank and taken the name of John Orth, disappeared on the high seas off the coast of South America. King Ludwig II. of Bavaria, the Empress’s cousin, committed suicide on June 13, 1886, drowning himself in the Lake of Starnberg in a fit of insanity. Count Ludwig of Trani, Prince of the Two Sicilies, husband of Duchess Matilda in Bavaria, and sister of the Empress, committed suicide at Zurich. Archduchess Matilda, daughter of Field-Marshal Archduke Albert, was burnt to death in her father’s palace as the result of a blazing log from the fire having set alight to her ball dress. Archduke Ladislas, son of the Archduke Joseph, came to grief while hunting by an accidental discharge of his gun. And now we learn that the Empress Elizabeth has been murdered.”