work of the next few years for Prussian statesmen was the removal of commercial barriers between the various German States, and the establishment of a Zollverein between them.  In this way the sway of Austria was weakened, and though political union as an aim was carefully kept in the background, the foundation for the subsequent consolidation of the German Empire was securely laid.  During the two central years of this process, 1832-4, Lord Minto was at Berlin.  The manners of the time were far simpler and the life at the court far more informal than they were soon to become.  Law and custom still preserved some lingering barbarities:  during their stay at Wittenberg they heard of a man being broken on the wheel.

They stopped at Brussels on the way.  There is a characteristic entry in Lady Fanny’s diary describing a visit to the battle-field.

    NAMUR, September 6, 1832

    We coach-people left Brussels much earlier than the others that we
    might have time to walk about Waterloo....

They showed us the house where the Duke of Wellington slept the night before and the night after the battle and wrote home his dispatches; then after a long and fierce dispute between a man and woman which was to guide us, the man took us to the Church, where we saw the monuments of immense numbers of poor common soldiers and officers—­then to the place where four hundred are buried all together and one sees their graves just raised above the rest of the ground.  Then we drove to the field of battle, and the man showed us everything; it was very nice and very sad to hear all about, but as I shall always remember it, I need say nothing about it.  We are quite in a rage about a great mound that the Dutch have put up with a great yellow lion on the top, only because the Prince of Orange was wounded there, quite altering the ground from what it was at the time of the battle.  The monument to Lord Anglesea’s leg too, which we did not of course go to see, makes one very angry, as if he was the only one who was wounded there—­and only wounded too when such thousands of poor men were killed and have nothing at all to mark the place where they are buried; and I think they are the people one feels most for, for though they do all they can, after they are dead one never hears any more about them.

Soon after their arrival at Berlin, Lady Minto fell dangerously ill.  From September, 1832, there is a long gap in Lady Fanny’s diary, for she had no heart to set anything down.  This long stretch of anxiety coming when she was sixteen years old, if it did not change her nature, brought to light new qualities which were to mark her character henceforward.  There is a little entry written down eight years afterwards on the birthday of her sister Charlotte which shows that she, as well as others, looked back on this time as a turning-point in her life.

    Bob’m sixteen to-day, just the age I began to be unhappy, because I
    began to think.  Heaven spare her from the doubts and fears that
    tormented me.