rooms and were shown the different souvenirs of Frederick the Great, and got home at ten-thirty.”  W. saw a good deal of his cousin, George de Bunsen, a charming man, very cultivated and cosmopolitan.  He had a pretty house in the new quarter of Berlin, and was most hospitable.  He had an interesting dinner there with some of the literary men and savants—­Mommsen, Leppius, Helmholtz, Curtius, etc., most of them his colleagues, as he was a member of the Berlin Academy.  He found those evenings a delightful change after the long hot afternoons in the Wilhelmsstrasse, where necessarily there was so much that was long and tedious.  I think even he got tired of Greek frontiers, notwithstanding his sympathy for the country.  He did what he could for the Greeks, who were very grateful to him and gave him, in memory of the efforts he made on their behalf, a fine group in bronze of a female figure—­“Greece” throwing off the bonds of Turkey.  Some of the speakers were very interesting.  He found Schouvaloff always a brilliant debater—­he spoke French perfectly, was always good-humoured and courteous, and defended his cause well.  One felt there was a latent animosity between the English and the Russians.  Lord Beaconsfield made one or two strong speeches—­very much to the point, and slightly arrogant, but as they were always made in English, they were not understood by all the Assembly.  W. was always pleased to meet Prince Hohenlohe, actual German ambassador to Paris (who had been named the third German plenipotentiary).  He was perfectly au courant of all that went on at court and in the official world, knew everybody, and introduced W. to various ladies who received informally, where he could spend an hour or two quietly, without meeting all his colleagues.  Blowitz, of course, appeared on the scene—­the most important person in Berlin (in his own opinion).  I am not quite convinced that he saw all the people he said he did, or whether all the extraordinary confidences were made to him which he related to the public, but he certainly impressed people very much, and I suppose his letters as newspaper correspondent were quite wonderful.  He was remarkably intelligent and absolutely unscrupulous, didn’t hesitate to put into the mouths of people what he wished them to say, so he naturally had a great pull over the ordinary simple-minded journalist who wrote simply what he saw and heard.  As he was the Paris correspondent of The London Times, he was often at the French Embassy.  W. never trusted him very much, and his flair was right, as he was anything but true to him.  The last days of the Congress were very busy ones.  The negotiations were kept secret enough, but things always leak out and the papers had to say something.  I was rather emue at the tone of the French press, but W. wrote me not to mind—­they didn’t really know anything, and when the treaty was signed France would certainly come out very honourably.  All this has long passed into the domain of history,