"As I went back to my room I heard a terrible uproar in the Great Court. It was Taras-Bulba, who had got bored with his stall, kicked open the stable-door, knocked down an ostler and two sentries, and was neighing fiercely to me from below. It was a much more difficult matter to get him quiet than to deal with the Grand Duke Rudolph. * * * * * * "After I became the Grand Duchess of Lautenburg-Detmold in the autumn of 1909, my first concern was to set about the improvements required to make this place reasonably comfortable. The gardens had been allowed to run riot, and as for the palace, it was crammed with horrors that even a negro chief would not have tolerated. "I soon revolutionized all that. Melusine, who came in the summer of 1910, would tell you that I spent my time then very much as I do now, except that when I felt particularly low-spirited I used to escape to Russia to relieve my feelings. "The person who did change was the Grand Duke Rudolph. Not that he ever ceased to treat me with the most unwearying attention, poor man! But after a year, when he had quite realized that his innocent little scheme was not working, and never would work, and that I should never be anything more to him than I had said, he became melancholy and spent most of his time indoors, Henceforth he was known at Lautenburg as 'Rudolph the Silent.' "Worse than that, he was out of favour with the Kaiser. William II. likes to think himself a kind of Louis XIV. He does not like German princes who don't haunt Berlin and accuses them of separatism. Now Rudolph has ceased to go to Court altogether. "He disliked seeing anybody, even at Lautenburg. The 7th Hussars had to get on as best they could without their colonel. He spent half his day, and nights in the library, studying works on mineralogy, his favourite science. It was, in fact, occupying his whole time when Baron von Boose came upon the scene. "Melusine knew this Boose, the mention of whose name made you start. There never was a worse bridge-player--was there, Melusine? He only knew ordinary bridge. I had asked the Grand Duke to lend him to us to make a fourth, but he was so stupid and disagreeable that I was soon only too glad to send him back to his beloved books. "He was very learned. That much at least must be said for him. For at thirty-two, though only a lieutenant in the Engineers, he was professor of topography at the _Kriegs Academie_. His book the 'Geotectonics of the Hanoverian Plain,' is a standard European work. At Berlin one day he assaulted a major who had asserted that there were rocks of quaternary origin in the Harz. Rudolph admired his work and went before the court-martial to give evidence on his behalf. Thanks largely to his intervention, Boose got off with sixty days' solitary confinement in a fortress. When his time was up my husband secured his appointment to the 3rd Battalion of Engineers at Lautenburg.