Spree, and drowning each time many
hundreds of workmen.

Even at the present moment Emperor William is engaged in an angry
fight with, the people of Berlin in connection with this palace.
He wishes to surround it with a terrace and a garden, which will
naturally add to its beauty. At present the windows look onto the
public streets, a fact which, in these days of bombs and dynamite
outrages, renders it difficult to protect with any degree of
efficiency. The municipality and people of Berlin, however, absolutely
decline to consent to the expropriations necessary in order to enable
the destruction and removal of the existing houses and buildings which
interfere with the execution of his majesty's project.

Like his uncle, the Prince of Wales, the kaiser is very superstitious
on the subject of the number thirteen in the case of any
entertainment, and more than once has a mere subaltern who happened to
be on duty at the palace as an officer of the guard, been commanded at
a moment's notice to join the imperial party in order to avoid there
being thirteen at the table.

This superstition is perhaps partly due to the fact that the emperor
is aware of the old Scandinavian custom, from which it originates, and
which still subsists among the peasantry of the west coast of France.
In the Pagan days of Scandinavia, the hardy Norsemen were accustomed
at all their banquets to invite the spirit of the last of their male
relatives or friends to participate in the feast, and the food that he
would have eaten and the mead that he would have drunk was cast into
the fire, the supposed resting-place of the soul. When the Norsemen
embraced Christianity, on ceremonious occasions they sat down to
the banquet in parties of twelve, doing this in honor of the twelve
Apostles; but unable entirely to disassociate themselves from their
old heathen custom of inviting the spirit of a dead relative or
friend, they constituted him,--the spectre,--the thirteenth guest at
table, and his health was always drunk in solemn silence. In course
of time people came to forget the traditional custom of considering
a spectre to be the thirteenth guest. He was, however, associated in
their minds with the notion of death, and thus the belief has grown
that though a thirteenth person at table is no longer a corpse, one of
the party is destined, at any rate, to speedily become one.

Throughout Brittany on the eve of the day sacred to the memory of the
dead "La T