questions about the tides and the currents and the navigable channels.
Then he lectured us on the family portraits till dinner; after dinner
there was a concert, at which he conducted the 'Song to Aegir,' and then
there was a torch-light fandango by the tenants on the lawn. He was on
his holiday, you must remember."

"I heard the 'Song to Aegir' once," remarked Falbe, with a perfectly
level intonation.

"I was--er--luckier," said Michael politely, "because on that occasion I
heard it twice. It was encored."

"And what did it sound like the second time?" asked Falbe.

"Much as before," said Michael.

The advent of the Emperor had put the whole town in a ferment. Though
the visit was quite incognito, an enormous military staff which had
been poured into the town might have led the thoughtful to suspect the
Kaiser's presence, even if it had not been announced in the largest type
in the papers, and marchings and counter-marchings of troops and sudden
bursts of national airs proclaimed the august presence. He held an
informal review of certain Bavarian troops not out for manoeuvres in the
morning, visited the sculpture gallery and pinacothek in the afternoon,
and when Hermann and Michael went up to the theatre they found rows
of soldiers drawn up, and inside unusual decorations over a section of
stalls which had been removed and was converted into an enormous box.
This was in the centre of the first tier, nearly at right angles to
where they sat, in the front row of the same tier; and when, with
military punctuality, the procession of uniforms, headed by the Emperor,
filed in, the whole of the crowded house stood up and broke into a roar
of recognition and loyalty.

For a minute, or perhaps more, the Emperor stood facing the house with
his hand raised in salute, a figure the uprightness of which made him
look tall. His brilliant uniform was ablaze with decorations; he seemed
every inch a soldier and a leader of men. For that minute he stood
looking neither to the right nor left, stern and almost frowning, with
no shadow of a smile playing on the tightly-drawn lips, above which his
moustache was brushed upwards in two stiff protuberances towards his
eyes. He was there just then not to see, but to be seen, his incognito
was momentarily in abeyance, and he stood forth the supreme head of his
people, the All-highest War Lord, who had come that day from the
field, to which he would return across half Germany tomorrow. It w