It was only when I chanced upon his favorite theme—we had returned to his little lodge, decorated with the antlers and tusks that were the trophies of his happiest days—that the caretaker showed any actual enthusiasm for the ex-Kaiser. I asked if it were true that the former emperor was a good shot. “_Ausgezeichnet!_” he cried, his weary eyes lighting up; “he was a marvelous shot! I have myself seen him kill more than eight hundred creatures in one day—and do not forget that he had to shoot with one arm at that.” He did not mention how much better record than that the War Lord had made on the western front, nor the precautions his long experience in the “hunting-field” had taught him to take against any possible reprisal by his stalked and cornered game.
The Crown Prince, he had told me somewhere along the way in the oppressive royal museum, was a very nice little boy, but his educators spoiled him. Since manhood he had been “somewhat _leichtsinnig_”—it was the same expression, the old refrain, that I had heard wherever the Kaiser’s heir was mentioned—“and his mind runs chiefly on women.” In one of the rooms we had paused before a youthful portrait of Queen Victoria. “I have seen her often,” remarked my guide, in his colorless voice. “She came often to visit us, at many of the palaces, and the first thing she invariably called for the moment she arrived was cognac.” It may have been merely a little side-slap at the hated English, but there was something in that particular portrait that suggested that the queen would have made a very lively little _grisette_, had fate chanced to cast her in that rôle.
Bismarck was plainly the old servant’s favorite among the titled throng he had served and observed. “When the second Kaiser died,” he reminisced, “after his very short reign—he was a good man, too, though proud—he gave me a message that I was to hand over to Bismarck himself, in person. The long line of courtiers were aghast when I insisted on seeing him; they stared angrily when I was admitted ahead of them to his private study. I knocked, and there was a noise inside between a grunt and a growl”—some of our own dear colonels, I mused, had at least that much Bismarckian about them—“and after I opened the door I had to peer about for some time before I could see where he was, the tobacco smoke was so thick. He always smoked like that. But he was an easy man to talk to, if you really had a good reason for coming to see him, and I had. When I went out all the courtiers stared at me with wonder, but I just waved a hand to them and said, ‘The audience is over, gentlemen!’ Ah yes, I have seen much in my day, _aber_,” he concluded, resignedly, as he accompanied me to the door of his lodge, “_alle diese gute Zeiten sind leider vorbei_.”