It seems scarcely necessary for the author to explain, as he does in the preface, that the "Emperor Willibald" of his romance is the Emperor William of Germany; that "Prince Ottomarck" is Prince Otto von Bismarck, and so on. A casual acquaintance with the names and the events of the Kaiser's reign must have made the identification; and there are few newspaper readers who would not have recognised in the strained relations between the Empeior Willibald and his sister, the Princess Margaret, which furnishes the central motive of the story, an imperial quarrel that has long been a public scandal in Berlin.