Ferdinand, the dethroned and retired Emperor of Austria, died on
Tuesday at Prague, where he had lived in privacy for many years. A German correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette tells one or two very amusing stories of his peculiar, and sometimes humorous, obstinacy and impassiveness. Taking shelter once from a storm at a Styiian farmer's, he found the farmer's wife just putting on the table a good dinner of dumplings, made of rather coarse flour, and the Emperor was invited to partake, which he not only did heartily, to the horror of his attendants, but- insisted ever afterwards on having similar dumplings of coarse flour brought up to his own table. His physicians prohibited this, and he was told he should not and could not have these dumplings, to which he simply replied that in that case the machinery of State must stand still, for nothing should be done until he received his dumplings. Again, at a council of Ministers, when a long re- port of great moment was being read, the Emperor, who was sitting at an open window, appeared to give the most earnest attention for hours, but when the Minister had at length finished he only said, "Four hundred and twenty-five fiacres and one hundred and eighty omnibuses have passed through the Hofburg during the last two hours." He was probably incapable of any sustained intellectual effort more severe than counting, but he was not incapable of gleams of humour, and his remark when he heard of his nephew's surrender of Lombardy, "Even I could have done that," was equally just to Francis's administration and to his own powers. He died at the age of eighty-two.
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