Good-hearted and endowed with a great many truly generous instincts the young fellow was, however, sorely handicapped by his education, the abnormal strictness displayed towards him at the Court of Berlin, and also by a continually and most distressingly empty purse. It is a hard and almost pitiful thing for the heir apparent of a great empire to find himself often without the necessary amount with which to cut the figure which his social rank forces him to adopt, and it must have been especially galling to the overbearing and proud nature of this boy to be continually obliged to borrow from his friends, nay even from his _aides de camp_, small sums wherewith to pay his way wherever he went. Nevertheless his father and mother, then Crown Prince and Crown Princess of Germany, believed it to be a thoroughly wholesome thing for the young man to have to humble his pride, should he not be content with the very small allowance made to him, this unfortunate idea being, however, the cause of a great deal of bitterness, which to this day has not completely faded from the heart of the now omnipotent ruler of the German Empire. It is undeniable that many eccentricities and false moves on the part of William II. have been grossly exaggerated and placed before the public in a false light, showing him up as a conceited, bumptious and silly person, whereas not only his state of health, but his _entourage_ should have been blamed for whatever he did that was out of place. During a great many years the young prince suffered from what is called technically _otitis media_, namely, a disease of the middle ear, very painful, exasperating and even somewhat humiliating to endure, and which he must have inherited in some extraordinary way from his great-uncle, King William IV. of Prussia, who died insane. There are certainly some traits of resemblance between this hapless monarch and the present occupant of the German throne, for in both there exists and has existed the same exaggerated and narrow-minded religious beliefs, bordering on mysticism, and also an all-embracing faith in their absolute and unquestionable infallibility. It has long since become a well-anchored creed that William II. has occasional fits of insanity. This is by no means the case, but it must be admitted that the peculiar malady to which I referred above, and which is as yet not eradicated from his system, causes him, at times, days of the most excruciating pains all over the back and side of his head, and it is scarcely surprising that at such moments the emperor should act in a way which astonishes the uninitiated. Indeed, William II. displays extraordinary force of character in suppressing physical agony, when the duties he owes to the state force him to come forward when unfit for anything else but the sick room.