That was a little incident that relieved the tedium of a visit to the Schloss at Berlin; for, in spite of the courtesies of host and hostess, I felt then, as I do in all palaces, that I was in a prison. Indeed, to me the palace life is so irksome that when I hear the sentry pacing up and down outside my windows, I always feel that he is there to prevent me from going out more than to prevent other people from coming in. Whenever I have stayed with the Kaiser and Kaiserin I have been given a beautiful suite of rooms; but a prison is still a prison, however thick the gilding on the bars. Everything one does or says is noticed and talked about, and criticised and spread abroad. All day long my Spanish lady-in-waiting sat in an ante-chamber with the German lady-in-waiting and the German chamberlain appointed to attend me. It was intolerable to think that these three persons were sitting there with nothing whatever to do but to speculate on what I should take it into my head to do next and to exchange Court gossip. In an outer chamber was another group of idlers, servants whose chief duty was to conduct me processionally from one part of the castle to another. Madame la Princesse appears in the antechamber, and the ladies make profound curtsies and the gentlemen profound bows. She smiles--princesses must always appear to be radiantly happy--and she tries to find something agreeable to say to each, and not to make bad blood by being more agreeable to one than to another. She announces her desire to go to the Kaiserin’s apartments. The chamberlain passes on that interesting information to the footman in the outer ante-chamber. A procession is formed, and Madame la Princesse is conducted, with the pomp of a bishop entering a cathedral to say Mass, to the other side of the castle. The procession passes through the Kaiserin’s ante-chamber, where another army of servants is idling, and the ladies-in-waiting who make profound curtsies and the gentlemen-in-waiting who make profound bows expect Madame la Princesse to smile and to repeat the gracious remarks about the state of the weather she has already made to the members of her own suite. The doors of the Kaiserin’s apartments are thrown open with becoming reverence, and Madame la Princesse disappears, leaving her suite to gossip with the Kaiserin’s, and probably to speculate on the nature of the royal conversation across the sacred threshold they may not pass unless bidden. A quarter of an hour elapses, and Madame la Princesse emerges, smiles at the bowing courtiers and curtsying ladies, and, feeling more like an idol than a human being, is solemnly conducted back and enshrined in her own apartments.