Before the day had closed, Victoria and her mother were escorted back to Kensington by the Life Guards to spend a short time before the Queen should take up her abode in Buckingham Palace. "I do not want to go there," she said to the Duke of Sussex. "I love the old Kensington Gardens, where I can wander about as I please. Buckingham Palace is far too big and too grand for me." Other people may choose their homes, but sovereigns are less free, and there was nothing to do but to leave the homelike Kensington, where her greatest troubles had been an occasional hard lesson, and go to Buckingham, or the New Palace, as it was called, which was to be her London residence. The New Palace was not yet completed, but men had been working night and day to prepare it for the Queen. It stood on a desolate sand-flat. There were dirty alleys and mud-puddles and dingy little hovels around it, but the coming of the Queen was to make it gorgeous. A splendid new throne, all dazzling in its crimson and gold, was built for her. "Is it as your Majesty would have it?" inquired the builder. "It's the most comfortable throne I ever sat on," replied the merry young sovereign. Buckingham was not lonely by any means. From over the whole country came delegations from universities, corporations, and all kinds of societies. One of these delegations was composed of Quakers, who believe that to uncover the head is to show to man a reverence that should be shown to God alone, and they marched up the stairway without removing their broad-brimmed gray hats. This could not be allowed, but the delegates could hardly be forbidden to see their Queen. Someone was quick-witted enough to discover a way out of the dilemma. "The Quakers won't take off their hats," he whispered, "but it is against their principles to resist violence and they won't object if we do it for them." Two of the attendants then respectfully raised each man's hat as he passed between them, and returned it to his head when the audience had come to an end. At the death of a sovereign, Parliament is always dissolved, and a new election is held. Victoria had stood by her "Aunt Adelaide's" side and seen the grand procession which marked the prorogation, but now the time had come for her to take the principal place in the procession. "It would be better to remain away and allow your speech to be read for you," said both her mother and her physician. "Remember how much you have been through within the past month, and avoid this unnecessary excitement." The little Queen was wiser than her watchful advisers. She knew well that her subjects had thronged every road leading to Buckingham because they wanted to see her, and she meant to gratify them and appear in all the splendor that a prorogation demanded. As to being exhausted by these ceremonials, she laughed at the idea of such a thing. "I like it all," she said. "I have lived so quietly that it is new to me. It isn't tiresome, it is amusing."