ABSTRACT
The Crown Prince appeared—William III already perhaps in the Emperor’s eyes. Obeying his father’s orders he had left Waulsort, his last headquarters in the rocky valley of the Maas, at an early hour that morning in the car in which he had been flitting about the neighbourhood for so long. The Emperor had, however, spared his son the hardships of the grammar-school years, on which he himself looked back with shudders. Thence the Crown Prince passed as a lieutenant into the barracks of the First Foot Guards, after solemnly swearing the military oath to his Imperial father in the “venerable old” castle chapel in Berlin. The Crown Prince showed that he had inherited something of his Imperial father’s theatrical nature, not only in the beaming glance of the eyes by which he was always striving to create an effect, but also in the somewhat affected and high-flown style of his writings.
