itable talent for mimicry keeping even
the sailors of the _Hohenzollern_ in continual roars of laughter. Yet
he can be grave and dignified on state occasions, and when one sees
him at the Court of Berlin arrayed in full uniform, his breast
covered with decorations, it is difficult to realize that this
imposing-looking diplomat is the principal partner of the autocrat
of Germany in such juvenile games as "Hot Cockles," which is a very
favorite game on board the _Hohenzollern_, and in which the kneeling
and blindfolded victim receives a terrific spank or smack, and then
has to guess, under the penalty of ridiculous forfeits, who it is that
struck him!

No one would ever have dreamt of finding any fault with this intimacy
between the emperor and the baron, had it not been for the fact that
the latter laid himself open to charges of having taken advantage of
the imperial favor won by mimicry and practical joking, to further
political and personal intrigues in which he was interested. Indeed,
he was repeatedly accused in the German press of being largely
responsible for the manifestation of animosity between the Court of
Berlin and Friedrichsrueh that characterized the last eight or nine
years of the life of Prince Bismarck. The newspapers did not
hesitate to assert that the baron, who had formerly been one of the
confidential secretaries of the old chancellor, had deliberately
fomented the irritation of the kaiser against the veteran statesman,
believing that any reconciliation between the monarch and his former
chancellor would entail the baron's disgrace. Finally, the abuse
of the baron in the Berlin press became so pronounced that he
was virtually obliged to challenge the editor of one of the most
vituperative of the metropolitan sheets, and very gallantly lodged a
bullet through the shoulder of this "knight of the quill!"

For this escapade the baron was condemned to three months'
imprisonment by the courts, duelling, as has been intimated already,
being forbidden by law in Germany. His incarceration in the military
fortress of Ehrenbreitstein on the Rhine was absolutely unprecedented.
Ambassadors and envoys have in times gone by been imprisoned by
sovereigns to whose courts they were accredited, in defiance of all
the laws of international right regulating the intercourse between
civilized powers, but this was the first occasion of a government
taking the unheard-of step of jailing one of its own envoys.

Fortunate