Original RESENTLY, when we were not in the least expecting it, there came a little sudden jolt that made us look at each other precipitately. Lady Torquilin was quite as nervous as I at this point. 'What has become of Oddie?' she exclaimed, and descried a red coat in a cab rolling up beside us with intense relief. As we passed through the Palace gates the cab disappeared, and chaos came again. 'Naughty boy!' said Lady Torquilin, in bitterness of spirit. 'Why, in the name of fortune, couldn't he have come with us in the carriage? Men have no nerves, my dear, none whatever; and they can't understand our having them!' But at that moment we alighted, in a maze of directions, upon the wide, red-carpeted steps, and whisked as rapidly as possible through great corridors with knots of gentlemen in uniform in them to the cloak-room. 'Hurry, child!' whispered Lady Torquilin, handing our wraps to the white-capped maid. 'Don't let these people get ahead of us, and keep close to me!'--and I observed the same spasmodic haste in everybody else. With our trains over our arms we fled after the others, as rapidly as decorum would permit, through spacious halls and rooms that lapse into a red confusion in my recollection, leaving one of my presentation cards somewhere on the way, and reaching the limit of permitted progress at last with a strong sense of security and comfort. We found it in a large pillared room full of regularly-curving lines of chairs, occupied by the ladies of the forty carriages that were before us. Every head wore its three white feathers and its tulle extension, and the aggregation of plumes and lappets and gentle movements made one in the rear think of a flock of tame pigeons nodding and pecking--it was very 'quaint,' as Lady Torquilin said when I pointed it out. The dresses of these ladies immediately became a source of the liveliest interest to us, as ours were apparently to those who sat near us. In fact, I had never seen such undisguised curiosity of a polite kind before. But then I do not know that I had ever been in the same room with so many jewels, and brocades, and rare orchids, and drooping feathers, and patrician features before, so perhaps this is not surprising. A few gentlemen were standing about the room, holding fans and bouquets, leaning over the backs of the ladies' chairs, and looking rather distraught, in very becoming costumes of black velvet and silk stockings and shoe-buckles, and officers in uniform were scattered through the room, looking as if they felt rather more important than the men in black; as I dare say they did, representing that most glorious and impressive British institution, the Army, while the others were only private gentlemen, their own property, and not connected with her Majesty in any personal way whatever.