Strange to say, I lost the links of my familiarity with him when he left us on a short visit to his trunks and portmanteaux, and had to lean on Temple, who tickled but rejoiced me by saying:  ’Richie, your father is just the one I should like to be secretary to.’

We thought it a pity to have to leave this nice foreign place immediately.  I liked the scenery, and the wine, and what I supposed to be the habit of the gentlemen here to dress in silks.  On my father’s return to us I asked him if we could not stay till morning.

‘Till morning, then,’ he said:  ‘and to England with the first lark.’

His complexion was ruddier; his valet had been at work to restore it; he was getting the sanguine hue which coloured my recollection of him.  Wearing a black velvet cap and a Spanish furred cloak, he led us over the villa.  In Sarkeld he resided at the palace, and generally at the lake-palace on the removal of the Court thither.  The margravine had placed the villa, which was her own property, at his disposal, the better to work out their conspiracy.

‘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