No one in Constance will forget the day when Napoleon, at the height of his power, came from Paris, to visit the home of his childhood. What grand preparations there were, what decorations, banners, bands, cannon; what a gilded equipage, for the Emperor to head the procession in! Suddenly the train whistle shrieks. “The Emperor! The Emperor!” cries the crowd, as he descends to the carpeted platform. The big, gilded carriage and the flunkies wait. “Where is my friend, Dr. Marmor?” asks the Emperor. He is sitting out there, in his old, one-horse buggy, looking at the scene, hoping for just a glance at Napoleon, as he will pass among the self-appointed bigwigs and flunkies. Suddenly the Emperor sees him, grasps him by the hand, and, springing into the old buggy, cries: “Drive on. To-day I ride with Marmor.” Then Marmor’s one-horse chaise, with nobody in it but the Emperor and himself, heads the procession through the city. At first, everybody stared, and then everybody cheered. Marmor, in five minutes, had become the first man in Constance. That incident has been his pride ever since. When I called on him, and told him I wanted to write for a magazine something about Napoleon’s boyhood, he gave himself wholly to my service, went with me everywhere, and told of a hundred frolics he and the young prince had had in the neighborhood. Prince Napoleon would have been a poor secretary for the Y. M. C. A. He was an awfully fast boy, according to one who “had been there” and knew all about it. Some other old folks whom I met in Constance, knew things also peppery to relate, were they more than big pranks, or worth the writing down. Hortense’s chateau is two miles or so outside the town. “Many a time,” said Marmor, “after half a night’s frolic with a few of us here in town, have I galloped with him out home, yelling half the way. It must have been the beer. When we got there, I slept till morning with him in the barn, the place where he had his study. He studied, too, spite of his fastness,” said the doctor. “How he read books! just as people nowadays read newspapers. He read everything, and he remembered it all. He was a generous soul, too; everybody said that. He was a famous youth for his kindness to the poor, just like his mother; only she was better. What a swimmer he was, what a wrestler, what a horseman, what a rake! As to horses,” the doctor went on, “why it was a common habit of his to mount, not by the stirrup, but by a single bound over the crupper and into the saddle.” It is curious now to know that Louis Napoleon once was a captain of militia here, and also a member of the school board. “Bismarck never hatched out more schemes in Berlin, than the young prince did out there in the barn, over the horses. In his mind’s eye, he was Emperor of France a dozen times out there. I guess all men do that, who have ambition,” continued the doctor, “and he was the most ambitious boy I ever knew. But nobody thought he had any chance for anything.”