I scrutinized Prince Hermann as rarely my observation had dwelt on any man.  He had the German head, wide, so as seemingly to force out the ears; honest, ready, interested eyes in conversation; parched lips; a rather tropically-coloured skin; and decidedly the manners of a gentleman to all, excepting his retinue of secretaries, valets, and chasseurs—­his ‘blacks,’ he called them.  They liked him.  One could not help liking him.

‘You study much?’ he addressed the princess at table.

She answered:  ’I throw aside books, now you have come to open the earth and the sea.’

From that time the topics started on every occasion were theirs; the rest of us ran at their heels, giving tongue or not.

To me Prince Hermann was perfectly courteous.  He had made English friends on his travels; he preferred English comrades in adventure to any other:  thought our East Indian empire the most marvellous thing the world had seen, and our Indian Government cigars very smokeable upon acquaintance.  When stirred, he bubbled with anecdote.  ‘Not been there,’ was his reply to the margravine’s tentatives for gossip of this and that of the German Courts.  His museum, hunting, and the Opera absorbed and divided his hours.  I guessed his age to be mounting forty.  He seemed robust; he ate vigorously.  Drinking he conscientiously performed as an accompanying duty, and was flushed after dinner, burning for tobacco and a couch for his length.  Then he talked of the littleness of Europe and the greatness of Germany; logical postulates fell in collapse before him.  America to America, North and South; India to Europe.  India was for the land with the largest sea-board.  Mistress of the Baltic, of the North Sea and the East, as eventually she must be, Germany would claim to take India as a matter of course, and find an outlet for the energies of the most prolific and the toughest of the races of mankind,—­the purest, in fact, the only true race, properly so called, out of India, to which it would return as to its source, and there create an empire magnificent in force and solidity, the actual wedding of East and West; an empire firm on the ground and in the blood of the people, instead of an empire of aliens, that would bear comparison to a finely fretted cotton-hung palanquin balanced on an elephant’s back, all depending on the docility of the elephant (his description of Great Britain’s Indian Empire).  ‘And mind me,’ he said, ’the masses of India are in character elephant all over, tail to proboscis! servile till they trample you, and not so stupid as they look.  But you’ve done wonders in India, and we can’t forget it.  Your administration of Justice is worth all your battles there.’

This was the man:  a milder one after the evaporation of his wine in speech, and peculiarly moderate on his return, exhaling sandal-wood, to the society of the ladies.