hristianity, and while he prayed at the Holy Places
like Emperor William, he did so quietly and unobtrusively, without
attracting any attention. His pilgrimage was characterized by the same
unaffected humility that distinguishes his religion from that of his
brother monarch at Berlin.

William's faith still retains the enthusiasm and, if I may use the
word, the exuberance of youth, whereas that of Francis-Joseph,
though even more fervent, is chastened, humbled and mellowed by the
experience of many a cruel sorrow and many a hard blow. To some
of these he would have succumbed had it not been for his religious
belief. There have been at least three different occasions during
his fifty years' reign when he would have abandoned his throne,
and abdicated his crown had it not been pointed out to him by his
spiritual adviser that it was his duty--his religious duty--to remain
at his post, and to bear with bravery the trials with which he was
overwhelmed.

The first of these occasions was at the close of the disastrous wars
of 1866, when the march of the Prussians on Vienna was only stayed
within a few hours' distance of the capital by the ignominious peace
of Nicolsburg. The second time was when he lost his only son by the
frightful tragedy of Mayerling, and he saw his boy's body refused even
Christian rites of burial by the church, until he had been able to
convince the kindly old pontiff at Rome that the poor lad's mind was
unbalanced at the time that he took his life. The third occasion was
when his lovely consort, to whom, in spite of all that is said to the
contrary, he was so deeply devoted, was taken from him by the hand
of an assassin in a foreign land, and under peculiarly heartrending
circumstances.

Moreover, he saw the body of his brother Maximilian brought home from
the Mexican plain of Queretaro, where he had been shot down by a file
of soldiers as if a vulgar criminal; he stood by the deathbed of
a favorite niece, burnt to death before his eyes in the palace of
Schoenbrunn, when her dress had caught fire from a lighted cigarette
which she was endeavoring to conceal from him and from her father; he
followed to the grave another favorite of his, a nephew, accidentally
killed while out shooting. Indeed, there is no end to the tragedies
which have gone to sadden the life of this now septuagenarian monarch,
and while on ordinary occasions, especially when engaged in military
inspections or in great court function