He is quite happy when he is out of doors explaining to me with his stick the plans he has for rebuilding New York and turning the Hudson River to make it run the other way.  But when he comes in he falls into the most dreadful depression and sometimes at night I hear him walking up and down in his room far into the night.  Two or three times he has had the same dreadful kind of seizures that he had on board the ship when we came over, and this is always when there is a great wind blowing from the ocean and a storm raging out at sea.

Of course as Uncle has not any work or any position, we are getting poorer and poorer.  Cousin Willie has been sent to the fortress at Sing-Sing and Cousin Ferdinand of Bulgaria refuses to know us any more, though, from what we hear, he is getting on wonderfully well in the clothing business and is very soon to open a big new store of which he is to be the general manager.  Cousin Karl is now the Third Assistant Head-Waiter at the King George Hotel, and in the sphere in which he moves it is impossible for him to acknowledge any relationship with us.  I don’t know what we should do but that Uncle Henry manages to give us enough of his wages to pay for our board and lodging.  Uncle Henry has passed his Naval Examination and is now appointed to a quite high command.  It is called a Barge Master.  They refused to accept his certificate of a German Admiral, so he had to study very hard, but at last he got his qualification and is now in charge of long voyages on the canals.

I am very glad that Uncle Henry’s command turned out to be on canals instead of on the high seas, as it makes it so much more German.  Of course Uncle Henry had splendid experience in the Kiel Canal all through the four years of the war, and it is bound to come in.  So he goes away now on quite long voyages, often of two or three weeks at a time, and for all this time he is in chief charge of his barge and has to work out all the navigation.  Sometimes Uncle Henry takes bricks and sometimes sand.  He says it is a great responsibility to feel oneself answerable for the safety of a whole barge-full of bricks or sand.  It is quite different from what he did in the German navy, because there it was only a question of the sailors and for most of the time, as I have heard Uncle William and Uncle Henry say, we had plenty of them, but here with bricks and sand it is different.  Uncle Henry says that if his barge was wrecked he would lose his job.  This makes it a very different thing from being a royal admiral.

But Uncle William all through the last three months has failed first at one thing and then at another.  After all his plans for selling pictures had come to nothing he decided, very reluctantly that he would go into business.  He only reached this decision after a great deal of anxious thought because, of course, business is a degradation.  It involves taking money for doing things and this, Uncle William says, no prince can consent to do.  But at last,