“When I returned to the station, I was surprised to find the Bunsens’ servant, sent on with my evening clothes, that I might accept an invitation (by telegram) to dine with the Crown Princess. I had only eight minutes before the royal train came up, and it was an awful scramble to wash and dress in a room the servant had taken at the station. However, when the royal train set off, I was in it. The palace-station of Wildpark was a pretty sight, red cloth laid down everywhere, and sixteen royal carriages waiting for the immense multitude of guests—quantities of ladies in evening dress (all black for the King of Hanover) and veils, splendid-looking officers, an Armenian archbishop and bishop in quaint black hoods and splendid diamond crosses. I went in a carriage with the Greek minister, and we whirled away through the green avenues to the great Neue Palais, with the sun striking warm on the old red and grey front. Count Eulenborg, Master of the Household, stood on the steps to receive us, and we passed into an immense hall, like a huge grotto, decorated with shells and fountains, where several of the court ladies were.
“At the end of the hall were some folding-doors closely watched by two aides-de-camp, till the rapping of a silver stick was heard from a distant pavement, when the doors were flung open, and Count Eulenborg came out, preceding the Prince and Princess. She immediately went up to Mrs. Grant (General Grant’s wife) and several other ladies, and then began to go the round of the guests. I had more than my fair share of her kindly presence. ‘Oh, Mr. Hare, I am so glad to see you again so soon. How little I expected it, and how sad the causes which have brought it about!’ And she went on to speak of how, at our last meeting, the Duchess of Argyll had been sitting with her at tea, and how three days after she died. ‘And for me it was only the opening act of a tragedy,’ she said. She talked of the shock which the news of the attack upon the Emperor was to her, coming to her in the picture-gallery at Panshanger, and of her hurried journey to him. The Crown Prince came up then, and led her away to dinner. Mrs. Grant was on his other side (General Grant, a very vulgar officious man, was also there). I had been directed to a place near the Archbishop and Bishop of Armenia, but as they only spoke Armenian, I was glad that a very handsome, agreeable aide-de-camp eventually took his place between me and them. The dinner was excellent, in a huge long marble hall, with windows opening to the ground on the terrace above the flower-garden. Occasionally I met a bright kindly smile as the Princess looked to see how I was getting on. There were about fifty guests, servants waiting noiselessly, not a footfall heard.
“After dinner we all went out on the terraces, and there the Crown Princess had the goodness to come again to me. She talked of all I had seen at Berlin, and of Sweden and Queen Sophie. She talked also of Queen Louisa, her husband’s grandmother, preferring her statue at Potsdam even to that at Charlottenburg, and wished to have sent an aide-de-camp with me to see it. She was so good as to desire that I should return to Potsdam, and when I showed her that I could not, said, ‘Oh, but you will now find your way again to Berlin to see me.’ The scene on the terraces was very pretty, looking upon the bright flowers beneath in the subdued light of a fine evening in this transparent atmosphere, the whole air scented with lime-flowers.
“At a quarter to nine all the carriages came again to take us away: Count Eulenborg announced them. In the ante-chamber I found the Crown Princess again. I kissed her hand, and she shook mine with many kind words, and sent affectionate messages to the Queen of Sweden.
“How we whirled away through the green avenues to Potsdam, where all the people turned out to see the cavalcade! I travelled back to Berlin with the young and very handsome Prince Friedrich of Hohenzollern (brother of the Prince of Roumania and the Comtesse de Flandres), who was saved in the annihilation of his regiment of guards in the second battle of Metz by being sent back with the standard.”
“July 5.—I spent Sunday at beautiful old Lübeck, full of colour and rich architecture, rising spire upon spire above the limpid river. In the streets and market-place are the quaintest towers, turrets, tourelles, but all end in spires. A great fat constable went about on Sunday morning, keeping everybody from following any avocation whatever during church-time: when the services were over, they might do what they liked.
“Then came the long weary journey across West Holstein—peat flats varied by marshy swamps—and a night at Schleswig, a white, colourless old town moored as if upon a raft in the marshes, where the Princess of Wales’ grandmother and other royal potentates lie in exposed coffins upon the floor of the ugly rugged old cathedral, which has a belfry like a dovecot. Everywhere roses grew in the streets on the house-walls. The children were hurrying along, carrying the shoes they were to wear in school.
