yes in conversation; parched lips; a rather
tropically-coloured skin; and decidedly the manners of a gentleman to
all, excepting his retinue of secretaries, valets, and chasseurs--his
'blacks,' he called them. They liked him. One could not help liking him.

'You study much?' he addressed the princess at table.

She answered: 'I throw aside books, now you have come to open the earth
and the sea.'

From that time the topics started on every occasion were theirs; the rest
of us ran at their heels, giving tongue or not.

To me Prince Hermann was perfectly courteous. He had made English friends
on his travels; he preferred English comrades in adventure to any other:
thought our East Indian empire the most marvellous thing the world had
seen, and our Indian Government cigars very smokeable upon acquaintance.
When stirred, he bubbled with anecdote. 'Not been there,' was his reply
to the margravine's tentatives for gossip of this and that of the German
Courts. His museum, hunting, and the Opera absorbed and divided his
hours. I guessed his age to be mounting forty. He seemed robust; he ate
vigorously. Drinking he conscientiously performed as an accompanying
duty, and was flushed after dinner, burning for tobacco and a couch for
his length. Then he talked of the littleness of Europe and the greatness
of Germany; logical postulates fell in collapse before him. America to
America, North and South; India to Europe. India was for the land with
the largest sea-board. Mistress of the Baltic, of the North Sea and the
East, as eventually she must be, Germany would claim to take India as a
matter of course, and find an outlet for the energies of the most
prolific and the toughest of the races of mankind,--the purest, in fact,
the only true race, properly so called, out of India, to which it would
return as to its source, and there create an empire magnificent in force
and solidity, the actual wedding of East and West; an empire firm on the
ground and in the blood of the people, instead of an empire of aliens,
that would bear comparison to a finely fretted cotton-hung palanquin
balanced on an elephant's back, all depending on the docility of the
elephant (his description of Great Britain's Indian Empire). 'And mind
me,' he said, 'the masses of India are in character elephant all over,
tail to proboscis! servile till they trample you, and not so stupid as
they look. But you've done wonders in India, and we can't forget it. Your
administ