On Sunday morning we went to the Zoölogical Gardens, where one of the keepers pleased my wife by raking a baby tiger and a baby lion out of their cages and giving them to her to hold in her arms. The lion was a chubby, woolly little fellow, the size of a cat and very cunning. While we had it in our hands, the mother stood perfectly quiet and glared at us as much as to say: “Hurt it, and these iron bars won’t hold me a moment.” She manifested great joy when the little fellow was passed back into the cage. The action of the tiger mother was not different, except that she gave a revengeful growl when she got her baby back. Several times in going to the city, I passed the home of Bismarck. It was an unpretentious place, but armed sentinels walked up and down the pavement in front of it. At noon one day, I noticed hundreds of people standing in front of the Emperor’s palace. I stopped to see what was the matter. The increasing crowd stood there in the rain. “There he is,” I heard some one cry out, and there was a doffing of hats. “There’s who?” I asked of a man near me. “Why, don’t you see him at the window?” he answered. It was the old Emperor standing there, smiling. Once a day all Berlin can look on their Kaiser, and once a day the Kaiser interrupts his Cabinet council, steps to the front window and looks upon his people. It is much better than the crazy hand-shaking of the mob at the White House. On our way back to Switzerland, we stopped at beautiful Dresden. One night at the opera we saw a white-haired old gentleman in a box, closely following the libretto and the singers, whose face seemed familiar to my wife. It was the King of Saxony--kind old Albert who, incognito, had played with our children that day in the mountains, and to whom our little girl had cried as he left, “Good-bye Mr. Albert.” * * * * * Our Minister’s difficulties at Berlin increased. The matter of American pig, or no pig, became a battle between German and American newspapers. Correcting the false statement and the misrepresentations as to Mr. Sargent’s Washington letter, helped none at all. The German newspapers simply did not want American meat. To American farmers and shippers, it meant hundreds of millions of dollars. Mr. Sargent stuck to his post and did his duty, and in a way, our Government supported him. One night Bismarck gave a grand diplomatic dinner. How could he receive Sargent socially when turning the cold shoulder to him officially? The press wondered what would happen. Of course our Minister had to be invited, and of course he had to go, or else show the white feather. Mr. Sargent was not the white feather kind, and he went. “Things went smoothly enough,” he wrote me, “and the newspapers got no sensation to report. It was a very quiet and rather tame party. Of course Bismarck and I did not spend the entire evening talking together. He didn’t effuse and I didn’t effuse. That was all there was of it.”[8]