your highness three times, and your
highness has each time assured him that he would get up, but has each
time, it seems, fallen asleep again."

"Yes, I did fall asleep each time," answered Frederick William, in a
somewhat irritated tone of voice; "and what of it?"

"Why," said Herr von Leuchtmar pleasantly--"why, the painter Gabriel
Nietzel, who arrived yesterday, and, to whom your highness promised to
give audience this morning at eight o'clock, has been waiting almost two
hours; Count von Berg, on whom your highness was to call at nine o'clock,
has been expecting you an hour in vain--the horse has stood saddled in the
stable for an hour; and the private secretary Mueller, with whom your
highness was to prepare to-day a treatise upon fortifications, will
probably make no progress whatever with the work."

"It seems that I am not to have the privilege of sleeping as long as I
choose," cried the Electoral Prince, with a mocking laugh. "My house moves
like clockwork, in which there is no comfort or rest whatever, but where
each must perform his prescribed service with mathematical exactness, that
the whole be not stopped."

"It is in a house as in a state," said Leuchtmar seriously: "each one,
high and low, must do his duty, else the whole machinery stops, and, as
your highness very justly remarked, the clockwork either stands still or
is at the least put out of order."

"Consequently, the clockwork of my house was disarranged merely because I
stayed up two hours later than I have been accustomed to do?"

"Totally disarranged, your highness."

The Prince reddened with displeasure, his eyes flashed, and he had already
opened his mouth for an angry reply, when he violently restrained himself.

"I will get up," he said, "and then we can talk more about it."

Herr von Leuchtmar bowed and withdrew to the antechamber. A quarter of an
hour, however, had hardly elapsed before the chamberlain issued from the
Prince's sleeping apartment, and announced to Herr Kalkhun von Leuchtmar,
that breakfast was served, and that his highness, the Electoral Prince,
awaited the baron's attendance at this meal in his drawing room. Herr von
Leuchtmar hastened to obey the summons, and to repair to the Prince's
drawing room. Frederick William seemed not at all conscious of his
entrance. He sat on the divan sipping his chocolate, and at the same time
restlessly playing with the greyhound that lay at his feet, looking up at
him with its gen