screams proceeding from one of these hovels. Several of us were out of
our saddles in an instant and rushed in at the low door.

Before the hearth, where a huge peat-fire was burning, stood a young
peasant woman, her face distorted with agonized grief, and holding in
her arms a bundle of blackened rags. We found that her baby had fallen
into the glowing embers, while she herself was occupied out of doors,
and the poor mite was so badly burned that there seemed but little
hope of its ever reviving from its state of almost complete coma. We
were all busying ourselves eagerly about the child and its distraught
mother, when raising my eyes from the palpitating form of the child,
I caught sight of "Prince William," as the kaiser was then called,
standing near the door, apparently quite undisturbed and unmoved by
this tragedy in lowly life. It even seemed to me in the dim light as
if he were smiling derisively at our efforts to relieve the sufferings
of the little one, and to soothe the grief of its mother. But my
indignation vanished quickly when a slanting ray of the setting sun,
piercing through the grime of the little window, revealed the presence
on his cheek of two very large and _bona-fide_ tears, which had
welled up in his eyes, to which the lad was endeavoring to impart an
expression of callous indifference; and when at last we left the hut
to seek a doctor for the tiny sufferer it was Prince William's own
military coat, none too new, and even, to say the truth, much worn,
that remained as an additional coverlet upon the roughly-hewn wooden
cot, over which the sobbing mother was bending.

"Nobody," I added, "will, therefore, make me believe that Emperor
William has not got a very soft spot in his heart, and that beneath
the mannerisms which he considers it necessary to affect in order to
maintain the dignity of his position as emperor,--those mannerisms