ls of a gentleman in his
company, but he answered that they were not loaded, and the shepherd's
life was saved. As they returned home the gentleman fired them off.
"What does that mean?" cried the Margrave, furiously. "It means,
gracious lord, that you will sleep sweeter tonight, for not having heard
my pistols an hour sooner."

From this it appears that the gracious lord had his moments of regret;
but perhaps it is not altogether strange that when he died, the whole
population "stormed through the streets to meet his funeral train, not
in awe-stricken silence to meditate on the fall of human grandeur, but
to unite in an eager tumult of rejoicing, as if some cruel brigand who
had long held the city in terror were delivered over to them bound and
in chains." For nearly thirty years this blood-stained miscreant had
reigned over his hapless people in a sovereign plenitude of power, which
by the theory of German imperialism in our day is still a divine right.

They called him the Wild Margrave, in their instinctive revolt from
the belief that any man not untamably savage could be guilty of his
atrocities; and they called his son the Last Margrave, with a touch
of the poetry which perhaps records a regret for their extinction as a
state. He did not harry them as his father had done; his mild rule was
the effect partly of the indifference and distaste for his country bred,
by his long sojourns abroad; but doubtless also it was the effect of a
kindly nature. Even in the matter of selling a few thousands of them to
fight the battles of a bad cause on the other side of the world, he had
the best of motives, and faithfully applied the proceeds to the payment
of the state debt and the embellishment of the capital.

His mother was a younger sister of Frederick the Great, and was so
constantly at war with her husband that probably she had nothing to do
with the marriage which the Wild Margrave forced upon their son. Love
certainly had nothing to do with it, and the Last Margrave early escaped
from it to the society of Mlle. Clairon, the great French tragedienne,
whom he met in Paris, and whom he persuaded to come and make her home
with him in Ansbach. She lived there seventeen years, and though always
an alien, she bore herself with kindness to all classes, and is
still remembered there by the roll of butter which calls itself a
Klarungswecke in its imperfect French.

No roll of butter records in faltering accents the name of the