both Doctor Wilhelm and Frederick von Kammacher disapproved of Bismarck's
exceptional anti-Socialist law and its consequences, they were filled
with hero worship of the man, Doctor Wilhelm the more so, since the home
of his childhood stood on the edge of Sachsenwald, scarcely an hour's
ride from Friedrichsruh. He was choke-full, of course, of local Bismarck
anecdotes and began to reel them off.

"Are you annoyed?" Bismarck asked his barber, when he came in one day
with his moustache twirled upward in the new fashion of the race tracks.
"A moustache trimmed and twisted like that to me looks as if it were
terribly annoyed and for no reason."




VII


The international gong had not been introduced on the _Roland_. The
trumpeter of the band sent two blasts across the promenade deck and
through the corridors of the first cabin as a signal for the midday meal.
The first blast entered with the howling of the wind into the close,
noisy, crowded smoking saloon. The attendant of the man without arms came
to conduct his master across the deck again. Frederick watched the
armless man with great interest. He seemed to be extraordinarily brisk
and quick-witted. He spoke English, French and German with equal fluency,
and to everybody's delight parried the impertinences of a saucy young
American, whose disrespectfulness did not yield even before the sacred
person of the captain; for which the dignified skipper sometimes rewarded
him by staring over his head like a lion over a yapping terrier.