one direction: "Teach him to seek all glory in the soldier
profession." When his mother or sister dared to interfere the King would
turn on them in a rage; Wilhelmina was sent time and again to her room,
to be starved until she grew more docile.

The boy's time was divided between Berlin and the Palace of
Wusterhausen, a country seat some twenty miles outside of the capital.
The palace was a very simple dwelling set in the middle of swampy
fields, with a fringe of thickets. In the grounds were many natural
fish-ponds, and game of all kinds was plentiful in the woods. The somber
old monarch loved this place, and had built there a fountain with stone
steps, where he liked to sit in the evening and smoke his long porcelain
pipe. He often had his dinner served by the fountain, and afterward
would throw himself down on the grass for a nap. Aside from this simple
entertainment, the King's only pleasure lay in hunting in the woods.

The children and their mother found Wusterhausen very unattractive. The
only pets they were allowed were two black bears, very ugly and vicious.
They had no comforts indoors, and were treated as though they were
children of the meanest peasant. Some boys might have found sport in the
fish-ponds, the groves and the streams about the place, filled as they
were with fish and game, but Fritz cared nothing for such things. Their
loneliness drew the two children closer and closer together, and their
dislike of their father increased with each year that he took them out
to Wusterhausen.

The father, on his part, was growing more and more contemptuous of his
son. He found Fritz cared nothing for the army, nothing for the chase,
that the hardship and exposure of rough life were torture to him. Worse
than that, he had discovered some verses in French that Fritz had
written, and spoke of him scornfully to the men of his court as "the
French flute-player and poet." It would have been very hard for the boy
if he had not had a mother and sister who were so devoted to him, and
did everything they possibly could to protect him from his father's
tyranny.

When he was fourteen, Frederick William appointed Fritz captain of his
Grenadier Guards. This was the regiment made up of giants, and was one
of the most singular passions of the very singular old King. He sent men
through the whole of Europe and Asia to search for very tall men. Some
of the regiment were almost nine feet high. When a foreign monarch
wished t