day: 'If thou begin
at the wrong end with things, and all go topsy-turvy after I am gone,
I will laugh at thee out of my grave!'" [Seckendorf (BARON), _Journal
Secret;_ cited in Forster, ii. 142.]

So Friedrich Wilhelm; laboring amid the mortal quicksands; looking into
the Inevitable, in various moods. But the memorablest speech he made to
Fritzchen or to anybody at present, was that covert one about the Kaiser
and Seckendorf, and the sudden flash of insight he got, from some word
of Seckendorf's, into what they had been meaning with him all along.
Riding through the village of Priort, in debate about Vienna politics
of a strange nature, Seckendorf said something, which illuminated his
Majesty, dark for so many years, and showed him where he was. A ghastly
horror of a country, yawning indisputable there; revealed to one as if
by momentary lightning, in that manner! This is a speech which all the
ambassadors report, and which was already mentioned by us,--in reference
to that opprobrious Proposal about the Crown-Prince's Marriage, "Marry
with England, after all; never mind breaking your word!" Here is the
manner of it, with time and place:--

"Sunday last," Sunday, 17th October, 1734, reports Seckendorf, Junior,
through the Nigger or some better witness, "the King said to the
Prince-Royal: 'My dear Son, I tell thee I got my death at Priort. I
entreat thee, above all things in the world, don't trust those people
(DENEN LEUTEN), however many promises they make. That day, it was April
17th, 1733, there was a man said something to me: it was as if you
had turned a dagger round in my heart.'" [Seckendorf (BARON), _Journal
Secret;_ cited in Forster, ii. 142.]--

Figure that, spoken from amid the dark sick whirlpools, the mortal
quicksands, in Friedrich Wilhelm's voice, clangorously plaintive; what a
wild sincerity, almost pathos, is in it; and whether Fritzchen, with
his eyes all bewept even for what Papa had suffered in that matter, felt
lively gratitudes to the House of Austria at this moment!--

It was four months after, "21st January, 1735," [Fassmann, p. 533.] when
the King first got back to Berlin, to enlighten the eyes of the Carnival
a little, as his wont had been. The crisis of his Majesty's illness is
over, present danger gone; and the Carnival people, not without some
real gladness, though probably with less than they pretend, can report
him well again. Which is far from being the fact, if they knew it.
Friedri