A faculty that in the Emperor has developed with the years is that of applying a sense of humour, not originally small, to the events of everyday life. He is always ready to joke with his soldiers and sailors, with artists, professors, ministers--in short, with men of every class and occupation. Several stories in illustration of his humour are current, but a homely example or two may here suffice. He is sitting in semi-darkness in the parquet at the Royal Opera House. "Le Prophète" is in rehearsal, and it is the last act, in which there is a powder cask, ready to blow everything to atoms, standing outside the cathedral. Fraulein Frieda Hempel, as the heroine, appears with a lighted torch and is about to take her seat on the cask. Suddenly the imperial voice is heard from the semi-gloom: "Fraulein Hempel, it is evident you haven't had a military training or you wouldn't take a light so near a barrel of gunpowder." And the _prima donna_ has to take her place on the other side of the stage. Or he is presenting Professor Siegfried Ochs, the famous manager of the Philharmonic Concerts, with the Order of the Red Eagle, third class, and with a friendly smile gracefully excuses himself for conferring an "Order of the third class on a musician of the first class," by pleading official rule. A third popular anecdote tells of a lady seated beside him at the dinner-table. Salad is being offered to her, but she thinks she is bound to give all her attention to the Emperor and takes no notice of it. Thereupon the Emperor: "Gnadige Frau, an Emperor can wait, but the salad cannot." Possibly the Emperor had in mind Louis XIII, who complained that he never ate a plate of warm soup in his life, it had to pass through so many hands to reach him. The German takes his theatre as he takes life, seriously. To cough during a performance attracts embarrassing attention, a sneeze almost amounts to misdemeanour. To the German the theatre is a part of the machinery of culture, and accordingly he is not so easily bored as the Anglo-Saxon playgoer, who demands that drama shall contain that great essential of all good drama, action. To the Anglo-Saxon, the more plentiful and rapid the action is, the better. The German, differing from most Anglo-Saxons, likes historical scenes, great processions, costume festivals, the representation of mediæval events in which his monarchs and generals played conspicuous parts. The Emperor has the same disposition and taste.