Apartments in Kensington Palace were assigned to the couple. The old queen had died at Kew, surrounded by such of her daughters as were in the country, and by several of her sons, in the month of November, 1818. George III. was dragging out his days at Windsor. The Prince Regent occupied Carlton House. The Kensington of 1819 was not the Kensington of today. In spite of the palace and gardens, which are comparatively little altered, the great crowded quarter, with its Museum and Albert Hall, is as unlike as possible to the courtly village to which the Duke and Duchess of Kent came, and where the Queen spent her youth. That Kensington consisted mainly of a fine old square, built in the time of James II., in which the foreign ambassadors and the bishops in attendance at Court congregated in the days of William and Mary, and Anne, and of a few terraces and blocks of buildings scattered along the Great Western Road, where coaches passed several times a day. Other centres round which smaller buildings clustered were Kensington House--which had lately been a school for the sons of French _emigres_ of rank--the old church, and Holland House, the fine seat of the Riches and the Foxes. The High Street extended a very little way on each side of the church and was best known by its Charity School, and its pastrycook's shop, at the sign of the "Pineapple," to which Queen Caroline had graciously given her own recipe for royal Dutch gingerbread. David Wilkie's apartments represented the solitary studio. Nightingales sang in Holland Lane; blackbirds and thrushes haunted the nurseries and orchards. Great vegetable-gardens met the fields. Here and there stood an old country house in its own grounds. Green lanes led but to more rural villages, farms and manor-houses. Notting Barns was a farmhouse on the site of Notting Hill. In the tea-gardens at Bayswater Sir John Hill cultivated medicinal plants, and prepared his "water-dock essence" and "balm of honey." Invalids frequented Kensington Gravel pits for the benefit of "the sweet country air." Kensington Palace had been bought by William III. from Daniel Finch, second Earl of Nottingham. His father, the first Earl, had built and named the pile of brick-building Nottingham House. It was comparatively a new, trim house, though Evelyn called it "patched up" when it passed into the hands of King William, and as such might please his Dutch taste better than the beautiful Elizabethan Holland House--in spite of the name, at which he is said to have looked, with the intention of making it his residence. The Duke of Sussex, as well as the Duke and Duchess of Kent, had apartments in the palace. He dwelt in the portion of the southern front understood to belong to the original building. His brother and sister-in-law were lodged not far off, but their apartments formed part of an addition made by King William, who employed Sir Christopher Wren as his architect.