It is one of the very few visualities or definite certainties we can lay hold of, in those young years of his, and bring conclusively home to our imagination, out of the waste Prussian dust-clouds of uninstructive garrulity which pretend to record them for us.

Whether it came into existence as a shadowy emanation from the Stralsund Expedition, can only be matter of conjecture.

To judge by size, these figures must have been painted about the year 1715; Fritz some three or four years old, his sister Wilhelmina seven.
It remains only to be intimated, that Friedrich Wilhelm, for his part, had got all he claimed from this Expedition: namely, Stettin with the dependent Towns, and quietness in Pommern.

Stettin was, from of old, the capital of his own part of Pommern; thrown in along with the other parts of Pommern, and given to Sweden (from sheer necessity, it was avowed), at the Peace of Westphalia, sixty years ago or more:--and now, by good chance, it has come back.

Wait another hundred years, and perhaps Swedish Pommern altogether will come back! But from all this Friedrich Wilhelm is still far.