His brother, Prince Joachim Albrecht, is also a very good musician, but differs radically from Prince Wilhelm. He plays the violoncello very well, and favors modern music. He composes ballads, and leads his own regimental orchestra. He is as jolly and unconventional as his brother is reserved and grave. When he dines with us he brings his violoncello, and I accompany him on my piano. He composed two very pretty and successful ballets, both given for charity. The first one was danced by Frederikke and two other girls and three young officers. It was called "_La Leçon de Danse_." On the top of the program, instead of the English device, "_Honi soit qui mal y pense_," I put "_Honi soit qui mal y danse_" in the same shield. Hardly any one in the German audience saw the joke--nothing more than that it was a _druckfehler_ (printer's error). The rehearsals were in my _salon_, and we had great amusement over them. The second ballet was more pretentious, and was danced in one of the largest theaters in Berlin. It was called the "Enchanted Castle." A parvenu buys an ancestral castle, and on his arrival there falls asleep in the great hall, filled with the portraits of ancestors and knights in armor. The ladies, in their old-fashioned dresses, step out from their frames, and with the knights in armor move in a stately quadrille. After they return to their frames, thirty young couples dance a ballet, and when they finish, the parvenu wakes up. It was very pretty and brought in a lot of money, and there was a question of its being repeated for the Emperor, but this was not done.
Dear L.,--The Crown Prince and the Crown Princess gave a small _bal-costume_. It was their first entertainment of any importance, though there were very few people invited. As Frederikke is a dancing young person, we were invited, enabling me to take many girls under my protecting wing. The Emperor was dressed as the Grand Elector of Brandenburg. The Empress had copied an old family portrait at San Souci. She had a voluminous blond peruke and a flowing blue dress. She looked very handsome. The Princes were generally dressed as their ancestors and looked very familiar, as almost all of them stand in the _Sièges Allée_. I learned much of German history that evening. The Emperor was very kind and gave me a spirited and concise history of those whom his six sons represented. No one except the Kaiser would ever have had the persistency to stay booted and spurred during the whole evening without a murmur, though he must have suffered from the heat and been uncomfortable to a great degree. He had thick, brown curls which hung close about his ears; thick, high, and hot leather boots; and heavy leather gloves which he conscientiously kept on till the very end.