The tragic fate of the young prince will be too fresh in the memory of my readers to need more than passing reference here. The boy, removed from parental care, was transferred by Emperor William to Berlin, with the avowed purpose of being under his own imperial eye. Unfortunately, the duties and occupations of William are so multifarious that he was unable to fulfil his very excellent intentions with regard to Prince Alfred. The latter fell into bad hands, squandered large sums of money at cards, became involved in pecuniary difficulties, and in his endeavors to retrieve them, sunk deeper and deeper into the mire, until finally Emperor William, suddenly alive to the results of his wholly-unintentional neglect of the royal lad, sent him back to his heart-broken parents, discredited, implicated in all sorts of unpleasant gambling transactions, and shattered alike in health and mind. In the midst of their silver-wedding festivities, they were forced to send their only boy off to a sanitarium in Austria, where, in spite of the close restraint under which he was kept, he managed to put an end to his life, only a few days after his arrival, prompted thereto by either physical or mental agony, no one knows which. Small wonder, when it became necessary to find a likely successor to the present reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg, and his younger brother, Prince Arthur of Great Britain, Duke of Connaught, was proclaimed heir, that the prince decided that it would be preferable to sacrifice his rights to this throne, rather than his rights over his only son. On being given to understand that if he accepted the position of heir apparent, his sixteen-year-old boy would become the ward of Emperor William, and that the authority of the kaiser would be superior to his own over the lad, Prince Arthur declined to have anything to do with the Saxe-Coburg succession, and abandoned both his own claims thereto and those of his son, in favor of his young nephew, the fatherless Duke of Albany. It was precisely on the same ground that the Duke of Cumberland declined to complete the agreement whereby a reconciliation was to be effected between himself and the kaiser. Born crown prince of the now defunct Kingdom of Hanover, he should have succeeded to the throne of the Duchy of Brunswick on the death of his kinsman, the late Duke of Brunswick, in 1884. The German Emperor, however, decided that he could not be permitted to take possession of the sovereignty of the duchy, nor to assume the status of one of the federal rulers of the confederation known as the German Empire, unless he recognized the latter, as now constituted, that is to say with his father's Kingdom of Hanover incorporated with Prussia. For a long time he refused to do this, but was ultimately persuaded by his brother-in-law, the late czar, and the Prince of Wales, to consent to a reconciliation with Prussia, and to accept the present condition of affairs. The