The Queen and Prince, like other parents, took the keenest and most intense delight in the evidence given from time to time that their children had gifts of mind which would have fitted them to excel in whatever position of life they had been placed. Frequent reference will be found in the following pages to their pride in the remarkable intellectual gifts of the Princess Royal, who was described while still a young girl as having “a statesmanlike mind.” Their boys were trained as carefully as if no royal road to distinction lay open to them. On returning from their first visit to their married daughter in Prussia in 1858, the Queen and Prince were met by the “delightful news that Affie” (Prince Alfred, aged 14) “had passed an excellent examination” (into the Navy) “and had received his appointment.” He met his father and mother at the private pier at Portsmouth “in his middle’s jacket, cap, and dirk, half blushing and looking very happy. He is a little pulled down from these three days’ hard examination, which only terminated to-day.... We felt very proud, as it is a particularly hard examination.” [19] The Queen visited Ireland again in 1853 to open the International Exhibition in Dublin; and a third time in 1861, when the Prince of Wales was going through a course of military training at the Curragh. CHAPTER X. HOME LIFE.--OSBORNE AND BALMORAL. It has already been remarked that the Queen throughout her reign has shown herself a thorough woman in being a good domestic economist. It was quite in accordance with this trait in her character that she and the Prince very early in their married life set themselves the almost Herculean task of the reform of the Royal Household. They found it in thorough disorganization, replete with confusion, discomfort, and extravagance. Various branches of the domestic service in the palaces were under the Heads of Government Departments; no one was responsible for the order and good administration of the whole. To give some idea of the prevailing confusion, Stockmar’s memorandum on the subject may be quoted where he points out that the Lord Chamberlain cleans the inside of the windows, and the Wood and Forests the outside. The degree of light admitted to the palace therefore depended on a good understanding between the two. Again, “The Lord Steward finds the fuel and lays the fire, the Lord Chamberlain lights it.... In the same manner the Lord Chamberlain provides all the lamps, and the Lord Steward must clean, trim, and light them.” If a pane of glass in the scullery had to be replaced, or a broken lock mended, a requisition had to be signed and counter-signed by no fewer than five different officials before the expenditure was finally sanctioned by the Woods and Forests, or the Lord Steward, as the case might be. Some of the servants were under the Lord Chamberlain, some under the Master of the Horse, some under the Lord Steward; as neither the first nor second of