‘It would have been mine!’ said my father, bending suddenly to my ear, and humming his philosophical ‘heigho,’ as he stepped on in minuet fashion.  We went through apartments rich with gilded oak and pine panellings:  in one was a rough pattern of a wooden horse opposite a mirror; by no means a figure of a horse, but apparently a number of pieces contributed by a carpenter’s workshop, having a rueful seat in the middle.  My father had practised the attitude of Prince Albrecht Wohlgemuth on it.  ’She timed me five and twenty minutes there only yesterday,’ he said; and he now supposed he had sat the bronze horse as a statue in public view exactly thirty-seven minutes and a quarter.  Tubs full of colouring liquid to soak the garments of the prince, pots of paint, and paint and plaster brushes, hinted the magnitude of the preparations.

‘Here,’ said my father in another apartment, ’I was this morning apparelled at seven o’clock:  and I would have staked my right arm up to the collar-bone on the success of the undertaking!’

‘Weren’t they sure to have found it out in the end, papa?’ I inquired.

‘I am not so certain of that,’ he rejoined:  ’I cannot quaff consolation from that source.  I should have been covered up after exhibition; I should have been pronounced imperfect in my fitting-apparatus; the sculptor would have claimed me, and I should have been enjoying the fruits of a brave and harmless conspiracy to do honour to an illustrious prince, while he would have been moulding and casting an indubitable bronze statue in my image.  A fig for rumours!  We show ourself; we are caught from sight; we are again on show.  Now this being successfully done, do you see, Royalty declines to listen to vulgar tattle.  Presumably, Richie, it was suspected by the Court that the margravine had many months ago commanded the statue at her own cost, and had set her mind on winning back the money.  The wonder of it was my magnificent resemblance to the defunct.  I sat some three hours before the old warrior’s portraits in the dining-saloon of the lake-palace.  Accord me one good spell of meditation over a tolerable sketch, I warrant myself to represent him to the life, provided that he was a personage:  I incline to stipulate for handsome as well.  On my word of honour as a man and a gentleman, I pity the margravine—­my poor good Frau Feldmarschall!  Now, here, Richie,’—­my father opened a side-door out of an elegant little room into a spacious dark place, ’here is her cabinet-theatre, where we act German and French comediettas in Spring and Autumn.  I have superintended it during the two or more years of my stay at the Court.  Humph! ‘tis over.’

He abruptly closed the door.  His dress belonged to the part of a Spanish nobleman, personated by him in a Play called The Hidalgo Enraged, he said, pointing a thumb over his shoulder at the melancholy door, behind which gay scenes had sparkled.

‘Papa!’ said I sadly, for consolation.