deplore such extravagance, cannot but be interested to see the utmost effort which kingly power can make to combine modern art and science and wealth into one stupendous whole. As one stands in the royal bedchamber,* dazzled by its golden glow, he is carried back in thought, by mere force of contrast, to the wretched slums of London and New York. There he had stood facing the lowest depths of misery and squalid ugliness to which the world can doom its most unfortunate; here he was in the presence of the utmost which wealth and human skill can do, at the close of the world's most powerful century, to satisfy human desire, minus the things for which the soul cries out. One must be dull indeed if such magnificence as that of Chiemsee

It has been estimated that it would probably cost nearly a million dollars to reproduce this room to-day with its furniture. The bedstead alone cost originally $60,000.

does not, even in the midst of his stupefaction, bring to his mind the words of the wise old King of Israel in the midst of his glory. These apartments interest him because they appeal to many natural tastes, but, after all, their supreme interest is that they are the latest effort to build Babel to heaven, to check the tides, to square the circle, to satisfy the soul by human answers to infinite questionings.

Lest I should have seemed to exaggerate the splendor of the apartments in the Chiemsee palace, I hasten to add that what I have said is sober fact. It is literally true that, after seeing them, the Czar's rooms in the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg are commonplace, while the royal apartments at Windsor Castle appear barren and shabby. Of the mirror gallery at Chiemsee, it has been said by one competent to judge," there is nothing on earth that can vie with it in richness." The famous hall at Versailles

cannot bear the comparison, for the effect in both is dependent largely on brilliant mirrors, and the art of glass-making was in a very imperfect state in the seventeenth century. Nor was this hall at Versailles (in which William of Prussia was proclaimed German Emperor in 1871) as large or as richly ornamented as the one at Chiemsee, which, while open to the criticism of being too elaborately and splendidly adorned, still subdues and overpowers the judgment. While suggesting to the gazer the Gallery of Apollo at the Louvre, it surpasses it point by point, as one wanders through its stately and radiant sweep from wing to wing of the palace.

This gallery is lighted at night by thirty-three splendid gold lustres, containing 2500 candles. Into it the King, who came from Munich once a year, unattended, save by a groom, would often wander after nightfall. Suddenly he would order

it to be illuminated, allowing but fifteen minutes for doing so. By machinery the chandeliers were simultaneously lowered to the floor, then lifted again when lighted, and in a few minutes the hall glowed with almost intolerable light, reflected from the enormous, bevelled, inch-thick mirrors, and from the gleaming gold embroidery. Nothing but candles was employed in all the apartments, and if lighted even for a moment they were never used again in the palace. This was but one of the wasteful and extravagant fancies which marked the King's career.

It was another fancy of Louis II. to arrive at Chiemsee always at midnight. On every 29th of September he descended at that hour at a solitary station near the banks of the lake. A marvellously beautiful gondola, which was never used on any other occasion, conveyed him to the island, propelled by two sailors in romantic costume. No human eyes were al

lowed to gaze on the King, save those of the few menials who ministered to his comfort. Vast sums were spent in building temporary continuations and elevations of the castle walls, that Louis might get an accurate idea of the whole as it would look when completed. If he happened to be unfavorably impressed with an inlaid floor, or a frescoed wall, it was immediately destroyed, without regard to the sum that might have been expended on it. Year after year, however, this enormous work proceeded, until at last the fortune and credit even of a King were exhausted. The various courts of Europe refused to aid him, and it is said that Bismarck answered his appeal by saying, he could only advise the King to appeal to the country, and under the same circumstances he would give the same reply to his own sovereign." Louis rejected this advice; but at last his mania became so pronounced that it could no longer be concealed. The Bavarians,

much relieved to be freed from the awful crime of rebelling against the Lord's anointed," under any provocation, gladly. pronounced it a case for medical care, and handed over the eccentric King to the charge of physicians.

As one wanders to-day through the halls on which he bestowed so much thought and care, so splendid in their adornment, and yet so uninhabited and so lonely, he cannot but feel a pang of pity at the fate of their former master. If he sinned much, he suffered much also; he was in a measure the victim of his inheritance and defective education. If he thought that he could, with all the art and gold and splendor of the world, appease the wild cravings of his restless nature for the infinite, he but repeated on a grander scale the eternal experiment of the ages, and in his failure illustrated, as men will go on doing through all history, the truth that no mortal remedy can heal the malady of an immortal soul.