sergeant in the armies of the Kaiser. Dorothea
Adolfina, the eldest daughter, rendered desperate
by continual persecution, had run away with
Count Putz von Putzenburg, the penniless
younger son of a sovereign count, whose family
had for centuries been bitter foes to the house of
Porkstein. Ludwig Adolf the Seventy-fourth had
the fugitive and disobedient princess duly cursed in
the court chapel by Ober-Hof-Prediger Dr. Bonassus,
and having added his paternal malison thereto,
cut her picture to shreds with a penknife, and
forbidden her name to be mentioned, under
penalty of the pillory and the spinning-house, by
any grand-ducal subject, felt comfortable. Of
his large family, then, there only remained at the
Residenz of Schweinhundhausen two young
princesses, who were fed on sauerkraut, kept in
continual terror, and whipped every Monday morning
by their governess, whether they deserved
it or not; and a very small young prince, named
Carl Adolf, whom, somehow, his cruel father did
not dare to ill treat, for he had his mother's eyes;
and it was only a week before his birth that the
poor grand-duchess (who died en couches of little
Carl) had looked with those same eyes (after a
horrible scene in the dining-room of the Residenz)
upon Ludwig the Seventy-fourth, and gasped out:
"You are my murderer." The ground-down
population of Schweinhundhausen used to say
that this tiny younker was the only human being
in the grand-duchy who dared say that his soul
was his own.

Ludwig Adolf was a prince who did as he
liked, and nearly everything he had a liking to
was bad. Whenever he put on his yellow stockings
striped with black, it was a sign that he
meant mischief, and he put them on at least
three times a week. In his grand court suit of
yellow velvet, with the famous stockings to
match, his blood-coloured ribbon of the Grand-
Ducal Order—pray observe the colour— of the
Pig and Whistle, and a monstrous white periwig
surmounting his swollen and violet-stained
countenance, he indeed merited his sobriquet of the
Terrible, and looked like a gigantic wasp crossed
with a Bengal tiger. He had an army of a
hundred and fifty men all clothed in flaming yellow
striped with black. He beat them unmercifully,
but was sometimes capriciously generous, and
caroused with them until unholy hours in the
dining-hall of the Residenz. He was very fond
of gambling, but woe be to the wretch who won
money of his Sovereign! He was given to deep
drinking, but he had no mercy upon the soldier
whose eyes were inflamed, or whose gait was
unsteady on parade. To the halberds, the picket,
or the black-hole with him at once! He had
invented a cat with thirteen tails for the especial
torture of his soldiers; but a cane was his famous
instrument of correction. He caned his lackeys,
he caned his children (always excepting little
Carl), he caned the page who, with his knees
knocking together, presented his mid-day beaker
of Rhine wine to him; he caned the sentinel at
the palace gate, who always had the palsy when
he presented arms to Ludwig the Terrible. He
would sally forth in the morning with a well-
caned aide-de-camp carrying horror and confusion
with him all over Schweinhundhausen. The
mothers hid their children under the bed when his
saffron-coloured roquelaure was seen at the end
of the street; the girls locked themselves in their
bedrooms; the baker felt his oven become icy;
the blacksmith shivered at his forge. He would
kick over the old women's spinning-wheels and
apple-stalls at the street corners. He would
burst into the taverns, declare the measures were
short, and cause all the beer to be flung into the
gutter. He would invade the tribunals, thrust
the Staats Procurator from his seat, bully the
Assessor, and reverse the sentences, always on the
side of severity. A dreadful dumbness,
accompanied by a sinking of the heart into the shoes,
and a quivering of the lip took place when he
entered the schools, and bade the Magister point
out to him the worst-behaved boys. Then he
would go home to the Residenz and dine on
spiced and fiery meats, oftentimes flinging the
plates and dishes at the heads of the servants,
or kicking his secretary's and chamberlain's shins
under the table. He ate like a shark, drank like
a hippopotamus, bellowed like a bull, swore like
a trooper, and then, until it was time to have a
carouse with his yellow-clad warriors, snored
like a pig. In short, Ludwig Adolf the Seventy-
fourth was an absolute monarch, and there were
a great many monarchs as trumpery and as tyrannical
as he on these charming Rhine banks in the
early days of the eighteenth century.

He was very rich. In fact, when one is absolute
and has a good private revenue, augmented
by the power of taking what does not belong to
one; and, moreover, when one takes a good deal,
wealth is a matter of course. How many barrels
full of gold Ludwigers, to say nothing of thalers
and florins, there were in the cellar of the Residenz,
I have never heard; but it was universally agreed
that Ludwig Adolf was rich enough to buy all
Putzenburg and Weissnichtwo, to say little of the
adjoining electorate of Kannnichtsagen, out-and-
out.

When your far-seeing British Parliament
resolved upon calling the illustrious House of
Brunswick to the throne of Great Britain, France,
and Ireland, and when, on the death of Queen
Anne, the illustrious Kurfurst or Elector of
Hanover became George the First of England, mighty
dreams of ambition began to course through the
heated brain of Grand-Duke Ludwig. He was
on friendly terms with the Elector King. He
had drank deep, and played deeper still, with
him. His majesty had said all kinds of flattering
things to him; why not, through that august
influence, now powerful in Germania, should not
he exchange his duchy for an electorate, for a
kingdom? or rather, why should he not create
one by aggrandising himself at the expense of
his neighbours—Putzenburg, and Weissnichtwo,
and Kannnichtsagen?

"It must be," cried Ludwig Adolf, twisting his