theaters in Berlin.  It was called the “Enchanted Castle.”  A parvenu buys an ancestral castle, and on his arrival there falls asleep in the great hall, filled with the portraits of ancestors and knights in armor.  The ladies, in their old-fashioned dresses, step out from their frames, and with the knights in armor move in a stately quadrille.  After they return to their frames, thirty young couples dance a ballet, and when they finish, the parvenu wakes up.  It was very pretty and brought in a lot of money, and there was a question of its being repeated for the Emperor, but this was not done.

February, 1908.

Dear L.,—­The Crown Prince and the Crown Princess gave a small bal-costume.  It was their first entertainment of any importance, though there were very few people invited.  As Frederikke is a dancing young person, we were invited, enabling me to take many girls under my protecting wing.  The Emperor was dressed as the Grand Elector of Brandenburg.  The Empress had copied an old family portrait at San Souci.  She had a voluminous blond peruke and a flowing blue dress.  She looked very handsome.  The Princes were generally dressed as their ancestors and looked very familiar, as almost all of them stand in the Sieges Allee.  I learned much of German history that evening.  The Emperor was very kind and gave me a spirited and concise history of those whom his six sons represented.  No one except the Kaiser would ever have had the persistency to stay booted and spurred during the whole evening without a murmur, though he must have suffered from the heat and been uncomfortable to a great degree.  He had thick, brown curls which hung close about his ears; thick, high, and hot leather boots; and heavy leather gloves which he conscientiously kept on till the very end.

The Kaiser is a wonderful personality.  The more I see him the more I admire him.  He impresses you as having a great sense of power and true and sound judgment.  And then he is kind and good.  I do not think him capable of doing a mean or small action.

Mrs. Vanderbilt drove me out to Potsdam in her motor, and, going through the forest, we passed in our hurried flight an automobile which we did not have time to remark upon.  That evening there was a ball at court.  When the Emperor spoke to me he said:  “You flew by the Empress and me like lightning this afternoon when we were walking in the forest.”

“Was that your Majesty’s motor?” I asked.  “We went so fast that I did little else than hold on to my seat.  It must have seemed ill-mannered to have flown by like that.”

There is to-night a Gesinde Ball to which we are going.  I know that you have no idea as to what a Gesinde Ball is, so I will tell you that it is a ball given at some kind house by a kind lady.  People dress themselves up as servants.  It is our wildest dream, and we are never so happy as when we are gotten up to look like ladies’ maids.  I can tell you how some of them will look—­self-made and to the manner born.  I am going, since commands from superior quarters make it imperative, as a giddy old housekeeper or a care (worn) taker who has taken a smart gown from her mistress’s wardrobe on the sly.