“You see that Schwarzenberg does not maintain that you enlisted six hundred able-bodied men.”

“Your highness!” cried Burgsdorf, trembling with passion, “this I see, that you have had me called here in order to dismiss me, to banish me forever from your presence—­and yet I have served you so faithfully, and have always hoped that you would forgive me.”

“Forgive?” asked the Elector.  “Had I anything to forgive in you?”

“Most gracious sir, that time after your return from The Hague I let my old heart carry me away; it was wholly wild and ungovernable and forgot the deference due your grace.”

“Ah, I remember now,” said the Elector, gently nodding his head.  “That time when you wanted to make a revolution and required me to place myself at your head.  You wanted to make of the poor little Electoral Prince a mighty rebel, and were even so kind as to promise that when with your help he had crushed Schwarzenberg he should become his father’s prime minister and Stadtholder in the Mark.”

“Your highness,” cried Burgsdorf indignantly, “those were well-meant schemes, and originated in the excess of our love for you.”

“Only, if I had adopted them, my father would have easily subdued the princely rebel with the Emperor’s support.  The Stadtholder in the Mark would then have had the pleasure of seeing upon the scaffold the Prince who had dared rebel against his own father, as befell Prince Carlos of Spain, when he revolted against his father, King Philip.  I thought a little about that unhappy, misguided Prince, and profited by his example.  You probably did not think of him, Burgsdorf, and fell into a great rage.  I am glad you remember that day, for actually I had forgotten it.”

“Most gracious sir, I would like to bite out my own tongue and swallow it,” screamed Burgsdorf, raving.  “I am a genuine old ass, and you do well to dismiss me forthwith; for I deserve nothing better, and am served quite right.  Just speak out at once, your highness.  I am discharged, am I not?”

“Quietly, Burgsdorf!” commanded the Elector sternly.  “I am no longer the Electoral Prince at whom you can scold and bluster, as you did that time in the palace of Berlin.”

“You always go back to the old story,” groaned Burgsdorf.

“And you,” said Frederick William, “you are just as impatient as you were then.  You cried murder and death, because the Electoral Prince would not do your will!  I told you—­I remember that very well now—­I told you that I would learn and wait.  I begged you to do the same and wait also.  But you, you would not wait; you cried out that you had already waited twenty years, and that now your patience was exhausted.  You had no compassion on the youth of eighteen years, who had just come out of a foreign land, and hardly knew how to distinguish friend from foe because he was not acquainted with the condition of things.  And yet you were already old and in your twenty years of waiting ought to have learned a little prudence!  But you had learned nothing at all and could not wait, and gave me up with wild impatience because I would not be guilty of criminal disrespect toward my father.”