Show BAVARIAS MAD KING I The Poor Fellow Has Been Crazy More Than Half His Life Should the Bavarian deputies indorse the action just taken by the upper house in deciding to place the insane King Otto under guardianship and transfer the crown to the madmans uncle Prince Luitpold regent and heir presumptive pre-sumptive this royal maniao will lose entirely the fictitious bauble of kingly authority which he has never been permitted per-mitted to exercise The story of the mad monarchs life reads like some strange tale of the middle ages Otto is now 46 years old and has been insane more than half of his life Ho nominally succeeded to the throne June 13 1886 when his brother King Ludwig Lud-wig IIwho had been deposed three days before because his insanity had become unendurablecommitted suicide sui-cide by drowning himself in the lake of Starnberg in the park of Berg castle to which he had been removed for safekeeping safe-keeping Ludwig had been crazy for years upon music and palaces King otto never actually reigned Prince Luitpold his uncle was appointed regent re-gent when King Ludwig was dethroned and has been the real ruler ever since thenOtto Otto has long been confined in the castle of Fuerstenried in the midst of a dense forest not far from Munich The most disagreeable task a Bavarian soldier has to perform is to do garrison duty there the gloom of the surroundings surround-ings being intensified by the dreadful appearance of the mad monarch His hair is long and Unkempt and his bushy brown beard reaches below his waist His eyes are usually fixed on empty space Ho is always dressed in black broadcloth At one time he fancied that his carpets were made of the finest glass and that it was dangerous to tread on them He would not be content until they were all taken up Another hallucination hallu-cination was that tho walls of his apart ments were hung with newspapers He would sit for hours facing a wall reading read-ing aloud what he imagined he found in those newspapers He smoked something some-thing like hundred cigarettes a day at last accounts using up a box of matches to light each one taking childish enjoyment enjoy-ment in the flash and crackle of the little lit-tle bits of wood Once occurred to him that it would be amusing to shoot peasants and he sat at a window all day long with a gun watching like a hunter for his game His attendants would load tho gun with peas instead of buckshot and a man in peasants dress would pass within range occasionally occa-sionally The king would shoot the man would drop and the apparently lifeless life-less body would be removed by guards |