To the scandal and consternation of the French Protestant gentlewomen and court-dames in their stiff silks: "Ahee, your Electoral Highness!" This had been a rough unruly boy from the first discovery of him.

At a very early stage, he, one morning while the nurses were dressing him, took to investigating one of his shoe buckles; would, in spite of remonstrances, slobber it about in his mouth; and at length swallowed it down,--beyond mistake; and the whole world cannot get it up! Whereupon, wild wail of nurses; and his "Mother came screaming," poor mother:--It is the same small shoe-buckle which is still shown, with a ticket and date to it, "31 December, 1692," in the Berlin _ Kunstkammer _; for it turned out harmless, after all the screaming; and a few grains of rhubarb restored it safely to the light of day; henceforth a thrice-memorable shoe-buckle.

[Forster, i.74.Erman, _ Memoires de Sophie Charlotte _ (Berlin, 1801), p.

130.] Another time, it is recorded, though with less precision of detail, his Governess the Dame Montbail having ordered him to do something which was intolerable to the princely mind, the princely mind resisted in a very strange way: the princely body, namely, flung itself suddenly out of a third-story window, nothing but the hands left within; and hanging on there by the sill, and fixedly resolute to obey gravitation rather than Montbail, soon brought the poor lady to terms.

Upon which, indeed, he had been taken from her, and from the women altogether, as evidently now needing rougher government.