Twice the Empress entered Vienna in state. The first time was in 1854, when she was a bride of seventeen, and then she rode in measureless pomp and with blare of music through a fluttering world of gay flags and decorations, down streets walled on both hands with a press of shouting and welcoming subjects; and the second time was last Wednesday, when she entered the city in her coffin and moved down the same streets in the dead of the night under swaying black flags, between packed human walls again; but everywhere was a deep stillness, now—a stillness emphasized, rather than broken, by the muffled hoofbeats of the long cavalcade over pavements cushioned with sand, and the low sobbing of gray-headed women who had witnessed the first entry forty-four years before, when she and they were young—and unaware! A character in Baron von Berger’s recent fairy drama “Habsburg” tells about that first coming of the girlish Empress-Queen, and in his history draws a fine picture: I cannot make a close translation of it, but will try to convey the spirit of the verses: I saw the stately pageant pass: In her high place I saw the Empress-Queen: I could not take my eyes away From that fair vision, spirit-like and pure, That rose serene, sublime, and figured to my sense A noble Alp far lighted in the blue, That in the flood of morning rends its veil of cloud And stands a dream of glory to the gaze Of them that in the Valley toil and plod. A SCRAP OF CURIOUS HISTORY Marion City, on the Mississippi River, in the State of Missouri—a village; time, 1845. La Bourboule-les-Bains, France—a village; time, the end of June, 1894. I was in the one village in that early time; I am in the other now. These times and places are sufficiently wide apart, yet today I have the strange sense of being thrust back into that Missourian village and of reliving certain stirring days that I lived there so long ago.