of an obscure Westphalian farmer, a person who in his youth had sat
barefoot watching pigs? It is true he had learning, and culture, and a
big head with plenty of brains in it, and the Countess Disthal had a
small head, hardly any brains, no soul to speak of, and no education.
This, I say, is true; but it is also neither here nor there. The
Countess was the Countess, and Fritzing was a nobody, and the
condescension she showed him was far more grand ducal than anything in
that way that Priscilla could or ever did produce.

Fritzing, unusually gifted, and enterprising from the first--which
explains the gulf between pig-watching and _Hofbibliothekar_--had
spent ten years in Paris and twenty in England in various capacities,
but always climbing higher in the world of intellect, and had come
during this climbing to speak English quite as well as most
Englishmen, if in a statelier, Johnsonian manner. At fifty he began
his career in Kunitz, and being a lover of children took over the
English education of the three princesses; and now that they had long
since learned all they cared to know, and in Priscilla's case all of
grammar at least that he had to teach, he invented a talent for
drawing in Priscilla, who could not draw a straight line, much less a
curved one, so that she should still be able to come to the library as
often as she chose on the pretext of taking a drawing-lesson. The
Grand Duke's idea about his daughters was that they should know a
little of everything and nothing too well; and if Priscilla had said
she wanted to study Shakespeare with the librarian he would have
angrily forbidden it. Had she not had ten years for studying
Shakespeare? To go on longer than that would mean that she was eager,
and the Grand Duke loathed an eager woman.

But he had nothing to say against a little drawing; and it was during