The court was very simple, and we heard stories of this through other friends who had the _entrée_. A Graefin D----, returning one evening from a court ball given in honor of the then Regent of Bavaria, gave me a bon-bon done up in silver paper, with a little photo of the Kaiserin on it. The bon-bon was white, and the Graefin said as long as any one could remember, these had been the official souvenirs of court dinners: only the photo varied. One charming girl we knew, a great favourite of the Empress, came back from the Palace one Christmas day, and told us what she had received from Her Majesty as a Christmas greeting--a small, old-fashioned tippet and muff of woolly white Angora, and two small, cheap Japanese vases, that some one had given the Empress the year before. The Royal magnificence one would expect gave way to--extreme simplicity let us call it. The Kaiser took a keen interest in the opera, and gave wonderful presents to his favourite singers. We saw a spectacle at the opera house that he was supposed to have inspired, and which was carried out under his direction. It was a sort of panorama of scenes in Corfu, where he spent much time. It must have been horribly expensive, for I never saw so much scenery at any performance, and it really was exquisite to see those beautifully reproduced scenes unfold before one. Such things, however, as painted castles and woods and flowers always seem to me excessively naïve. The Russian idea of a wonderful imaginative back-drop is infinitely more stimulating to a performance. Of course, there are places where it cannot be used. If the scene is laid in a Childs' restaurant a back-drop might perhaps be comic to a mind not yet used to making its own pictures; but I hope and believe the aim is towards simplicity in this direction; but the simplicity must be carried out by artists, and first-rate ones. Who, who has seen the leaping figures of the Russian Ballet in "Prince Igor," has felt a lack on the scenic side because the tents with their feather of smoke were suggested on a flat back-drop? Who longed for real, that is, one-side real, tents--with steam escaping from a semi-hidden pipe through the top? The luridness was suggested by colour far more skilfully than if rocks, thinly swaying and lit by red lights, had cluttered up the wings. Make the audience do the thinking, blend stimulation with simulation, and if your artist has been a true one no one will cry for flapping pillars, or crumpled leaves on a net.