When one thinks of the Court of Berlin one should not forget that the New Palace, the Emperor’s residence at Potsdam, sixteen miles distant from the capital, is as much, and as important, a part of it as the royal palace in Berlin itself.  The Emperor divides his time between them, the former, when he is not travelling, being his more permanent residence, and the latter only claiming his presence during the winter season and for periods of a day or so at other parts of the year, when occasion requires it.  It is only during the six or eight weeks of the winter season that the Empress and her daughter, Princess Victoria Louise (now Duchess of Brunswick), go into residence at the Berlin royal palace.  There is a railway between Potsdam and Berlin, but since the introduction of the motor-car the Emperor almost always uses that means of conveyance for the half-hour’s run between his Berlin and Potsdam palaces.

The other section of the Court, if Potsdam may be so described, is hardly less rich in memories than the old palace by the Spree.  Indeed it is richer from the cosmopolitan point of view, for though Frederick the Great was born in the Berlin Schloss and spent some of his time there, it was at Potsdam that, when not campaigning, he may be said to have lived and died.  To this day, for the foreigner, his personality still pervades the place, and that of the Emperor sinks, comparatively, into the background.  The tourist who has pored over his Baedeker will learn that Potsdam has 53,000 inhabitants and is “charmingly situated”—­it depends on your temperament what the charm is, and to guide-book framers all tourists have the same temperament—­on an island in the Havel “which here expands into a series of lakes bounded by wooded hills.”  He will learn that the old town-palace, which few visitors give a thought to, was built by the Great Elector, that Frederick the Great lived here in “richly decorated apartments with sumptuous furniture and noteworthy pictures by Pater, Lancret, and Pesne”; that it contains a cabinet in which the dining-table could be let up and down by means of a trap-door, and “where the King occasionally dined with friends without risk of being overheard by his attendants”; that the present Emperor, then Prince William, lived here with his young wife when he was still only a lieutenant.  He will drive to the New Palace—­now old, for it was built by Frederick the Great in 1769, during the Seven Years’ War, at a cost of nearly half a million sterling—­and gaze with interest at the summer residence of the Emperor.  If he is an American he may think of his multi-millionaire fellow-citizen, Cornelius Vanderbilt, who, when driving up to call on his erstwhile imperial schoolfellow and friend, was nearly shot at by a sentry for whom the name Vanderbilt was no “Open Sesame.”  He will see before him a main building, seven hundred feet in length, three stories high, with the central portion surmounted by a dome, its chief facade looking