During the latter half of February and in March the Emperor is usually at Potsdam, occasionally motoring to Berlin to give audience or for some special occasion.  April and part of May are passed in Corfu.  Towards the end of May the Emperor returns to Germany and goes to Wiesbaden for the opera and Festspiele in the royal theatre; but he must be in Berlin before May has closed, for the spring parade of the Berlin and Potsdam garrisons on the vast Tempelhofer Field.  His return on horseback from this parade is always the occasion of popular enthusiasm in Berlin’s principal streets.  In early June the Emperor stays at Potsdam or perhaps pays a visit to some wealthy noble, and at the end of the month the yachting week calls him to Kiel.  Once that is over he proceeds on his annual tour along the coast of Norway.  September sees him back in Germany for the autumn manoeuvres.  October and November are devoted to shooting at Rominten or some other imperial hunting lodge, or with some large landowner or industrial magnate.  The whole of December is usually spent at Potsdam, save for an annual visit to his friend Prince Fuerstenberg at Donaueschingen.  Naturally he is in Potsdam for Christmas, when all the imperial family assemble to celebrate the festival in good old German style.

In music, as we know, he retains the classical tastes he has always cultivated and sometimes dictatorially recommended.  Good music, he has said, is like a piece of lace, not like a display of fireworks.  He still has most musical enjoyment in listening to Bach and Handel.  The former he has spoken of as one of the most “modern” of composers, and will point out that his works contain melodious passages that might be the musical thought of Franz Lehar or Leo Fall.  He has no great liking for the music of Richard Strauss, and his admiration of Wagner, if certain themes, that must, one feels, have been drawn from the music of the spheres, be excepted, is respectful rather than rapturous.  Of Wagner’s works the “Meistersingers” is “my favourite.”

A faculty that in the Emperor has developed with the years is that of applying a sense of humour, not originally small, to the events of everyday life.  He is always ready to joke with his soldiers and sailors, with artists, professors, ministers—­in short, with men of every class and occupation.  Several stories in illustration of his humour are current, but a homely example or two may here suffice.  He is sitting in semi-darkness in the parquet at the Royal Opera House.  “Le Prophete” is in rehearsal, and it is the last act, in which there is a powder cask, ready to blow everything to atoms, standing outside the cathedral.  Fraulein Frieda Hempel, as the heroine, appears with a lighted torch and is about to take her seat on the cask.  Suddenly the imperial voice is heard from the semi-gloom:  “Fraulein Hempel, it is evident you haven’t had a military training or you wouldn’t take a light so near a barrel of gunpowder.”