Almost every year sees some specialty produced at the Royal Opera in Berlin.  This year it was Meyerbeer’s “Les Huguenots,” performed in the presence of the French Ambassador in Berlin, Monsieur Jules Cambon, and two directors of the Paris Opera.  The Emperor told Monsieur Messager, one of the latter, that he had taken an infinity of trouble to get the right character, colour, and movement of the period of the opera, and explained his interest in the work by the fact that he had lost two of his ancestors, Admiral Coligny and the Prince of Orange, in the historic massacre.  This opera, with Verdi’s “Aida,” are still, as given at the Royal Opera, the favourite operas of the Berlin public.

Americans, like all other people, regard the Emperor with friendly feelings, but for a time this year their respect for him suffered some diminution owing to what was known as the Tower-Hill affair.  When the American Ambassador in Berlin, Mr. Charlemagne Tower, resigned his post in 1908, the Washington authorities found difficulty in choosing a suitable successor.  Mr. Tower was a wealthy man, who by his personal qualities, aided by a talented wife, whom the Emperor once described as “the Moltke of society,” and by frequent entertainments in one of the finest houses of the fashionable Tiergarten quarter, had fully satisfied the Emperor of his fitness to represent a great nation at the Court of a great Empire.  The Emperor has a high opinion of his country, and, in small things as in great, will not have it treated as a quantite negligeable:  consequently a millionaire was not too good for Berlin.  The impression produced by Mr. Tower on Republican America was not quite the same.  When Ambassador in St. Petersburg, Mr. Tower had invented a Court uniform for himself and staff of a highly ornate, not to say fantastic, kind, and when in Berlin was thought to take too little trouble to win popularity among his American fellow-colonists.  This non-republican attitude, as it seemed to be, met with a good deal of adverse criticism in America, and the Washington authorities, for that or for some other reason, considered it advisable to choose as Mr. Tower’s successor a man of another type.  Their choice fell on Dr. David Jayne Hill, American Minister at Berne, a former President of Rochester University, the author of a standard work on the History of Diplomacy, and as renowned for the amiability of his character as for his academic attainments.  A further reason for choosing him was that he had been attached to the service of the Emperor’s brother, Prince Henry, during the latter’s visit to the United States some years before.  Dr. Hill spoke German excellently, was able and distinguished, and, if not a man of great means, was sufficiently well-to-do to represent his country becomingly at the Court of Berlin.  His selection was in due course communicated for agrement to the German Foreign Office, and by it, also in due course, transmitted to the Emperor.  The Emperor without more ado signed the agrement and the arrival of Dr. Hill in Berlin was daily expected.