thoughts, was, just at this time, in a deep domestic intricacy.
Uncle George the Kurprinz was painfully detecting, in these very
months, that his august Spouse and cousin, a brilliant not
uninjured lady, had become an indignant injuring one; that she had
gone, and was going, far astray in her walk of life! Thus all is
not radiance at Hanover either, Ninth Elector though we are;
but, in the soft sunlight, there quivers a streak of the blackness
of very Erebus withal. Kurprinz George, I think, though he too is
said to have been good to the boy, could not take much interest in
this burly Nephew of his just now!

Sure enough, it was in this year 1693, that the famed Konigsmark
tragedy came ripening fast towards a crisis in Hanover; and next
year the catastrophe arrived. A most tragic business; of which the
little Boy, now here, will know more one day. Perhaps it was on
this very visit, on one visit it credibly was, that Sophie
Charlotte witnessed a sad scene in the Schloss of Hanover
high words rising, where low cooings had been more appropriate;
harsh words, mutually recriminative, rising ever higher; ending,
it is thought, in THINGS, or menaces and motions towards things
(actual box on the ear, some call it),--never to be forgotten or
forgiven! And on Sunday 1st of July, 1694, Colonel Count Philip
Konigsmark, Colonel in the Hanover Dragoons, was seen for the last
time in this world. From that date, he has vanished suddenly
underground, in an inscrutable manner: never more shall the light
of the sun, or any human eye behold that handsome blackguard man.
Not for a hundred and fifty years shall human creatures know,
or guess with the smallest certainty, what has become of him.

And shortly after Konigsmark's disappearance, there is this sad