The outstanding feature of the visit was not the castle itself, however, but the attitude of this lifelong servant of the imperial owner. The assertion that no man is a hero to his valet applies, evidently, clear up to emperors. The caretaker was a former soldier in a Jäger and forestry battalion, born in the Thüringerwald fifty-six years ago, a man of intelligence and not without education. He had been one of hundreds who applied for a position in the imperial household in 1882, winning the coveted place because he came “with an armful of fine references.” To him the Kaiser and all his clan were just ordinary men, for whom he evidently felt neither reverence nor disdain. Nor, I am sure, was he posing democracy; he looked too tired and indifferent to play a part for the benefit of my uniform. The many gossipy tales of royalty, semi-nobility, and ignobility with which he spiced our stroll were told neither with ill feeling nor with boastfulness; they were merely his every-day thoughts, as a printer might talk of his presses or a farmer of his crops. Wilhelm der Erste, the first Kaiser, was a good man in every way, he asserted. He had seen him die. He had been called to bring him his last glass of water. Bismarck and a dozen others were gathered about his bed, most of them kneeling—the picture of Bismarck on his knees was not easy to visualize somehow—“and the emperor died with great difficulty”—my informant demonstrated his last moments almost too realistically. The Kaiser—he who wrecked the Hohenzollern ship—was a very ordinary man, possibly something above the average in intelligence, but he did not have a fair chance in life. There was his useless arm, and then his ear. For forty years he had suffered atrociously from an abscess in his left ear. The caretaker had seen him raging mad with it. No treatment ever helped him. No, it was not cancer, though his mother died of that after inhuman suffering, but it was getting nearer and nearer to his brain, and he could not last many years now. Then there was his arm. No, it was not inherited, but resulted from the criminal carelessness of a midwife. For years he used an apparatus in the hope of getting some strength into that arm, tying his left hand to a lever and working it back and forth with his right. But it never did any good. He never got to the point where he could lift that arm without taking hold of it with the other. He grew extraordinarily clever in covering up his infirmity; when he rode he placed the reins in the useless left hand with the right, and few would have realized that they were just lying there, without any grasp on them at all. He kept that arm out of photographs; he kept it turned away from the public with a success that was almost superhuman. On the whole, he was a man with a good mind. “No one of average intelligence can help being a knowing man if he has Ministers and counselors and all the wise men of the realm coming to him every day and