“I cannot speak calmly when I think of my mother,” he went on. “For political reasons, which means, in plain English, her brother’s need of money, she was married to my father as a child of seventeen, after being summarily converted for the purpose. Needless to say, her consent was not asked to either process. She made him an excellent wife, and if he had taken her advice, it would, I believe, have averted the revolution which cost him his throne; but on account of her German and Protestant upbringing she was always looked upon with distrust, and my father himself shared it. So strongly did she disapprove of the perpetual intrigues by which he sought to regain his kingdom after losing it, that soon after my birth an amicable separation was arranged, without giving rise to any scandal. My mother retired with me to an estate on the Adriatic, where my father and brothers visited us occasionally, and I was sometimes conducted, much against my will, to Vindobona, which my mother, on the plea of ill-health, always avoided, and from which I always returned to her with increasing joy. As I grew older her one fear was that I might be taken from her, and to escape this she proposed that I should be entered as a student at the naval academy of the great dockyard and arsenal which lay not far from us. Though all my training hitherto had been military, it was the sea to which my own heart turned, and I don’t know whether my mother or I was the more rejoiced when I was allowed to follow my bent. For several happy years I worked hard at the mysteries of shipbuilding--much harder than suited my superiors and companions, who would have preferred to see me placed in some post of nominal authority, where I should not trouble them. Several times it was suggested that I should be appointed to a sea-going ship, and sent on a long cruise, but my mother’s piteous entreaties--she humbled herself to my father and the Emperor in her agony at the thought of losing me--and my own absorption in my work, which seemed likely to be productive of great advantage to the navy in future, gained me a respite. One of the complaints against me was that I withdrew myself from the society of companions of my own age. It did not occur to my accusers that in my leisure hours I had the constant society of a woman who had read widely, thought deeply, and suffered much, and that this had quite spoiled me for the company of the class of men I met every day. I always look back to my twenty-third year as the period of my greatest happiness--perhaps in contrast with the dark time which followed. A legacy had come to me from a godfather when I was twenty-one, and I spent the greater part of it in building a large steam-yacht from my own designs. Some of my relations looked askance at such waste of money, but the Emperor, finding that the yacht was intended to test various inventions of my own in naval matters, was pleased with my interest in my profession, and encouraged me. I called