TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.

The success which "Um Szepter und Kronen" has met with on the Continent justifies an English translation. The author, who writes under the nom de plume of Gregor Samarow, is, if report speak truly, himself one of the characters described in his work as the friend and confidant of the chivalrous and unfortunate sovereign who is its principal hero. This explains the ease and familiarity with which the various courts and cabinets are described, the author's personal acquaintance with the statesmen and diplomatists he has pourtrayed, and it accounts for the value of the work as a clever and interesting political sketch. It is as a political sketch, and not as an ordinary novel, that it is offered to this country.

Although the great events of 1870 and 1871 have almost swept from memory the history of preceding years, yet the struggle of 1866--the Seven Weeks' War--must ever be memorable; it was the prelude to the great Franco-German War, and its immediate result was that immense increase in the power of Prussia which placed her in her present position of supreme leader in Germany.

CONTENTS OF VOL. I.

Chapter
I.[Bismark and Manteuffel].
II.[Fair Wendland].
III.[Vienna].
IV.[Napoleon].
V.[George V].
VI.[An Erring Meteor].
VII.[The Duel and the Rose].
VIII.[Francis Joseph II].
IX.[Helena].
X.[Berlin].
XI.[The Last Day at Herrenhausen].
XII.[Campaigning begins].

FOR SCEPTRE AND CROWN.

CHAPTER I.

[BISMARCK AND MANTEUFFEL].

About nine o'clock on a dark April evening in the year 1866, a Berlin cab drove up the Wilhelmsstrasse with the trot peculiar to those vehicles, and stopped between the two lamps illuminating the door of No. 76, the house of the Minister for Foreign Affairs. The ground floor of this long two-storeyed house was well lighted up, and any one who peeped through the green blinds could see into many office-like rooms, well-filled with industrious writers, notwithstanding the lateness of the hour. The windows of the upper storey were only faintly lighted here and there.

From the cab which drew up before this house stepped a middle-sized man, dressed in a dark paletot and black hat; he came close to the gas-lamp to look in his purse for the right coins with which to pay the fare, and as soon as he had settled with the numbered Automedon he rang loudly at the door-bell.

The door opened almost immediately, and the person demanding admittance entered a spacious porte-cochère, at the end of which, between two large sleeping stone lions, ascended the flight of steps leading to the interior of the house. On one side of the doorway a window opened into the porter's lodge, and at the window appeared the porter's face, wearing that peculiarly stolid expression common to the door-keepers of all great houses.