Before the hearth, where a huge peat-fire was burning, stood a young peasant woman, her face distorted with agonized grief, and holding in her arms a bundle of blackened rags. We found that her baby had fallen into the glowing embers, while she herself was occupied out of doors, and the poor mite was so badly burned that there seemed but little hope of its ever reviving from its state of almost complete coma. We were all busying ourselves eagerly about the child and its distraught mother, when raising my eyes from the palpitating form of the child, I caught sight of "Prince William," as the kaiser was then called, standing near the door, apparently quite undisturbed and unmoved by this tragedy in lowly life. It even seemed to me in the dim light as if he were smiling derisively at our efforts to relieve the sufferings of the little one, and to soothe the grief of its mother. But my indignation vanished quickly when a slanting ray of the setting sun, piercing through the grime of the little window, revealed the presence on his cheek of two very large and bona-fide tears, which had welled up in his eyes, to which the lad was endeavoring to impart an expression of callous indifference; and when at last we left the hut to seek a doctor for the tiny sufferer it was Prince William's own military coat, none too new, and even, to say the truth, much worn, that remained as an additional coverlet upon the roughly-hewn wooden cot, over which the sobbing mother was bending.
"Nobody," I added, "will, therefore, make me believe that Emperor William has not got a very soft spot in his heart, and that beneath the mannerisms which he considers it necessary to affect in order to maintain the dignity of his position as emperor,—those mannerisms which have given rise to so much misapprehension about his character,—there is not concealed a very kindly spirit, literally brimming over with generous impulses, which, if more widely known, would serve to render the kaiser the most popular, as he is the most interesting figure of Old World royalty."
It is because Emperor Francis-Joseph and the veteran King of Saxony are so thoroughly acquainted with his real nature, that they are truly and honestly fond of him. Both of them old men, with no sons in whom to seek support for the eventide of lives that have been saddened by many a public and private sorrow, they entertain a fatherly affection for William, who as emperor treats them in public as brother sovereigns, and as equals, but accords to them in private the most touching filial deference and regard, remembering full well the kindness which both of them showed to him when he was still the much-snubbed, and not altogether justly-treated "Prince William." They on their side are led by his behavior towards them to regard him in the light of a son. Of course they cannot be blind to his faults, but they are disposed to treat them with an indulgence that is even more than paternal, and to see in them relatively trivial defects, due to the manner in which he was brought up, and which are certain to disappear with advancing years and experience.
During his early manhood, Prince William was by no means a favorite either at his grandfather's court or at that of any other foreign sovereign which he was occasionally allowed to visit. Pale-faced and delicate-looking, very severely treated by his mother, who is what one is bound to call une maîtresse femme, the boy at seventeen was by no manner of means prepossessing, and his efforts to assert himself, and to crush down a good deal of natural awkwardness and timidity added to his singularly unlikeable appearance.
In those days it could clearly be seen that everything that he did or said was meant to create an impression of dignity and of grandeur, to which his physique did not lend itself very easily, and the contrast between him and his bosom friend the courteous, graceful and dashing Crown Prince of Austria, was very marked.
Good-hearted and endowed with a great many truly generous instincts the young fellow was, however, sorely handicapped by his education, the abnormal strictness displayed towards him at the Court of Berlin, and also by a continually and most distressingly empty purse. It is a hard and almost pitiful thing for the heir apparent of a great empire to find himself often without the necessary amount with which to cut the figure which his social rank forces him to adopt, and it must have been especially galling to the overbearing and proud nature of this boy to be continually obliged to borrow from his friends, nay even from his aides de camp, small sums wherewith to pay his way wherever he went. Nevertheless his father and mother, then Crown Prince and Crown Princess of Germany, believed it to be a thoroughly wholesome thing for the young man to have to humble his pride, should he not be content with the very small allowance made to him, this unfortunate idea being, however, the cause of a great deal of bitterness, which to this day has not completely faded from the heart of the now omnipotent ruler of the German Empire.
It is undeniable that many eccentricities and false moves on the part of William II. have been grossly exaggerated and placed before the public in a false light, showing him up as a conceited, bumptious and silly person, whereas not only his state of health, but his entourage should have been blamed for whatever he did that was out of place. During a great many years the young prince suffered from what is called technically otitis media, namely, a disease of the middle ear, very painful, exasperating and even somewhat humiliating to endure, and which he must have inherited in some extraordinary way from his great-uncle, King William IV. of Prussia, who died insane. There are certainly some traits of resemblance between this hapless monarch and the present occupant of the German throne, for in both there exists and has existed the same exaggerated and narrow-minded religious beliefs, bordering on mysticism, and also an all-embracing faith in their absolute and unquestionable infallibility.
It has long since become a well-anchored creed that William II. has occasional fits of insanity. This is by no means the case, but it must be admitted that the peculiar malady to which I referred above, and which is as yet not eradicated from his system, causes him, at times, days of the most excruciating pains all over the back and side of his head, and it is scarcely surprising that at such moments the emperor should act in a way which astonishes the uninitiated. Indeed, William II. displays extraordinary force of character in suppressing physical agony, when the duties he owes to the state force him to come forward when unfit for anything else but the sick room.
The truth of the matter is that there are but few who can boast of knowing him well, and the masses as well as the classes both at home and abroad seem to take a peculiarly keen delight in accepting for gospel truth any sweeping statements made about him by the press of all civilized countries.
Although twenty-nine years of age when he ascended the throne on June 15, 1888, he may be said to have been at that time still but a raw youth, continually kept in the background, and treated more or less like a child, without any consequence or weight. It is, therefore, not remarkable that the first years of his reign should have been signalized by many errors of judgment; for it is not with impunity that one suddenly releases a person, locked up for years in a dark room and drives him into dazzlingly-lighted spaces without a guide, a philosopher, or a friend by his side to lead him on the way. The mental, as well as the physical optic has to gradually become accustomed to so complete a change, and this fact was not sufficiently taken into consideration by all the detractors of the young monarch, when he, to speak very familiarly, leaped over the saddle in his anxiety to secure for himself a firm seat on the throne of his forefathers.