anything to forgive in you?"

"Most gracious sir, that time after your return from The Hague I let my
old heart carry me away; it was wholly wild and ungovernable and forgot
the deference due your grace."

"Ah, I remember now," said the Elector, gently nodding his head. "That
time when you wanted to make a revolution and required me to place myself
at your head. You wanted to make of the poor little Electoral Prince a
mighty rebel, and were even so kind as to promise that when with your help
he had crushed Schwarzenberg he should become his father's prime minister
and Stadtholder in the Mark."

"Your highness," cried Burgsdorf indignantly, "those were well-meant
schemes, and originated in the excess of our love for you."

"Only, if I had adopted them, my father would have easily subdued the
princely rebel with the Emperor's support. The Stadtholder in the Mark
would then have had the pleasure of seeing upon the scaffold the Prince
who had dared rebel against his own father, as befell Prince Carlos of
Spain, when he revolted against his father, King Philip. I thought a
little about that unhappy, misguided Prince, and profited by his example.
You probably did not think of him, Burgsdorf, and fell into a great rage.
I am glad you remember that day, for actually I had forgotten it."

"Most gracious sir, I would like to bite out my own tongue and swallow
it," screamed Burgsdorf, raving. "I am a genuine old ass, and you do well
to dismiss me forthwith; for I deserve nothing better, and am served quite
right. Just speak out at once, your highness. I am discharged, am I not?"

"Quietly, Burgsdorf!" commanded the Elector sternly. "I am no longer the
Electoral Prince at whom you can scold and bluster, as you did that time
in the palace of Berlin."

"You always go back to the old story," groaned Burgsdorf.

"And you," said Frederick William, "you are just as impatient as you were
then. You cried murder and death, because the Electoral Prince would not
do your will! I told you--I remember that very well now--I told you that I
would learn and wait. I begged you to do the same and wait also. But you,
you would not wait; you cried out that you had already waited twenty
years, and that now your patience was exhausted. You had no compassion on
the youth of eighteen years, who had just come out of a foreign land, and
hardly knew how to distinguish friend from foe because he was not
acquainted with the condition of things. And ye