Fortunately for the baron, the King of Denmark was, before his accession to the throne, an officer of the German army, and as such was disposed to regard with the utmost leniency the offence for which his excellency was condemned to imprisonment.  He realized that the baron had no alternative but to fight, his honor having been questioned by the paper whose editor he challenged.  Although duelling is forbidden by the criminal law of Germany, under the penalty of imprisonment, yet, had the baron failed to fight, and taken shelter behind the law, he would not only have been compelled to resign his diplomatic office, his position at court, and his rank in the army, but he would have subjected himself to such odium as to have become to all intents and purposes a social outcast, and compelled to leave Germany.

Appreciating this, old King Christian raised no objections to the appointment of a charge d’affaires, to represent the diplomatic interests of Germany at his court, during the term of imprisonment served by the minister plenipotentiary, and from the moment when the latter completed his term, and was liberated from prison, he resumed his duties as envoy at the Court of Copenhagen, just as if nothing had happened.

Another intimate friend of the kaiser, who possesses much the same talents de societe as Baron Kiderlen-Waechter, and whose position in the high favor of the kaiser has been a subject of much unfavorable comment, and even of open abuse in Berlin, is Baron Holstein, popularly known as the “Austern-Freund" or “Oyster-Friend,” owing to his altogether phenomenal capacity for the absorption of bivalves, and his strongly developed fondness for good cheer!  Baron Holstein, like Baron Kiderlen-Waechter, was formerly one of the confidential secretaries of Prince Bismarck, and a daily guest at his table, and was treated as a member of the old chancellor’s family for years, yet he became one of the most relentless foes of the Bismarck family as soon as the prince was dismissed from office.

Prince Bismarck was not the sort of man to submit in silence to the enmity of his former secretary, and a few years after his retirement to Friedrichsrueh he took occasion, during the course of a public discussion of the circumstances which led to the disgrace and ruin of Count Harry Arnim, for a long time German ambassador at Paris, to disclose for the first time in speech, and in print, the part which Baron Holstein had played in the affair.  According to the prince, Baron Holstein, while first secretary of the German embassy at Paris, and though treated by Count Arnim as an inmate of his home, living in fact under his roof, and eating at his table, was in the habit throughout an entire year of sending secret reports to Berlin against the chief under whom he was serving—­reports which subsequently furnished the basis of the charges upon which Count Arnim was tried, convicted and disgraced.