three or four months lodging with a German lady, who provided a room and breakfast, and where I did pretty much as I liked in company with other young Englishmen and Americans. It was a very long and cold winter, the Elbe being frozen over, and skating in the Grosser Garten was the principal amusement. It was the year after the Polish insurrection and there were many Polish ladies and refugees in the town whose company we found much more agreeable than that of the Germans, and as my knowledge of French made me quite at home with them I learnt much less German that I might otherwise have done.
In those days Germany was a very cheap country. One heard the best possible music in the stalls at the opera for a thaler; one had the best possible dinner in the Victoria Hotel for two marks, and Liebfraumilch such as I have never tasted since for a thaler a bottle. The English Minister, Mr. Murray, rented a large tract of shooting in the country, and used to ask me to shoot regularly, and here I met an old Colonel von Heygendorf who commanded the Saxon Life Guards, a great horseman and a great sportsman, who took a fancy to me and used to drive me out in his sledge to shoot. He was a most reckless driver, and when the snow was deep used to break in young horses from his regiment by harnessing three or four of them to a sledge and driving at full gallop through the villages.
It was the custom at these shooting parties to have a sweepstake of a thaler each which went to the man who shot most foxes. The Colonel was very knowing about the likeliest post for foxes to come to, and would ask the Englishmen who did not shoot foxes to exchange posts if they drew a lucky post. Hares, roe and foxes were the principal game in the woods, which were driven by large numbers of beaters directed in military order by the bugle. In the open plains there were a good many partridges and the plan adopted to get within shot of them was what the Germans called a "Kesseljagd.” This is managed by forming a circle of guns with two or three beaters between each, who surround a large circle of open fields a mile or more in diameter. When the circle is completed, the advance is blown by the Jagdmeister and everyone walks towards the centre of the surrounded area. The hares and partridges at first usually run or fly in- wards, but as the circle diminishes and the guns get nearer to each other they begin to fly or run back, and the birds afford excellent rocketing shots overhead. I was lucky enough on one occasion to bring down a part- ridge which, flying fast down wind, dropped almost on the head of the Colonel who was a long way from me. This lucky shot reminded him of me when I visited the old man twenty-five years later at Dresden with my wife and daughter, who, he insisted, should accompany him to see Buffalo Bill’s show, which was then going on. He tried to enlist me as an officer in his regiment, saying that I should never learn half as much in the English Army. But my father very wisely refused, and three years later the Saxon Life Guards, when covering the retreat of the Austrian Army at the battle of Sadowa, were very severely handled and lost a great number of their strength.
In May, 1865, I joined the Scots Guards as an Ensign and Lieutenant at Shorncliffe Camp. Colonel Hepburn, our Commanding Officer, was a fine old soldier of the type of those days, and Captain Wynne Finch was
