According to Temple’s description, when the statue moved its head toward him, a shudder went through the crowd, and a number of forefingers were levelled at it, and the head moved toward me, marked of them all.  Its voice was answered by a dull puling scream from women, and the men gaped.  When it descended from the saddle, the act was not performed with one bound, as I fancied, but difficultly; and it walked up to me like a figure dragging logs at its heels.  Half-a-dozen workmen ran to arrest it; some townswomen fainted.  There was a heavy altercation in German between the statue and the superintendent of the arrangements.  The sun shone brilliantly on our march to the line of carriages where the Prince of Eppenwelzen was talking to the margravine in a fury, and he dashed away on his horse, after bellowing certain directions to his foresters and the workmen, by whom we were surrounded; while the margravine talked loudly and amiably, as though everything had gone well.  Her watch was out.  She acknowledged my father’s bow, and overlooked him.  She seemed to have made her courtiers smile.  The ladies and gentlemen obeyed the wave of her hand by quitting the ground; the band headed a long line of the commoner sort, and a body of foresters gathered the remnants and joined them to the rear of the procession.  A liveried groom led away Temple’s horse and mine.  Temple declared he could not sit after seeing the statue descend from its pedestal.

Her Highness’s behaviour roughened as soon as the place was clear of company.  She spoke at my father impetuously, with manifest scorn and reproach, struck her silver-mounted stick on the carriage panels, again and again stamped her foot, lifting a most variable emphatic countenance.  Princess Ottilia tried to intercede.  The margravine clenched her hands, and, to one not understanding her speech, appeared literally to blow the little lady off with the breath of her mouth.  Her whole bearing consisted of volleys of abuse, closed by magisterial interrogations.  Temple compared her Highness’s language to the running out of Captain Welsh’s chaincable, and my father’s replies to the hauling in:  his sentences were short, they sounded like manful protestations; I barely noticed them.  Temple’s version of it went:  ’And there was your father apologizing, and the margravine rating him,’ etc.  My father, as it happened, was careful not to open his lips wide on account of the plaster, or thick coating of paint on his face.  No one would have supposed that he was burning with indignation; the fact being, that to give vent to it, he would have had to exercise his muscular strength; he was plastered and painted from head to foot.  The fixture of his wig and hat, too, constrained his skin, so that his looks were no index of his feelings.  I longed gloomily for the moment to come when he would present himself to me in his natural form.  He was not sensible of the touch of my hand, nor I of his.  There we had to stand until the voluble portion of the margravine’s anger came to an end.  She shut her eyes and bowed curtly to our salute.