When the address to the Throne in reply to the Queen's message announcing the declaration of war was presented, her Majesty and the Prince were accompanied to the House for the first time by the Prince of Wales, a boy of thirteen. In the middle of the worry, the season was gay as if no life-blood was drained in strong currents from the country; and Varna, with its cholera swamps, where the troops had encamped on Turkish soil, was not present to all men's minds. The Queen set an example in keeping up the social circulation without which there would be a disastrous collapse of more than one department of trade. On May-day, Prince Arthur's birthday, there was a children's ball, attended by two hundred small guests, at Buckingham Palace. Sir Theodore Martin quotes her Majesty's merry note, inviting the Premier to come and see "a number of happy little people, including some of his grandchildren, enjoying themselves." Among the grandchildren of Lord Aberdeen were the young sons of Lord Haddo--sinking under a long wasting illness--George, sixth Earl of Aberdeen, who, when he came to man's estate, served as an ordinary seaman in a merchant ship, where his rank was unsuspected, and who perished by being washed overboard on a stormy night; and the Honourable James Gordon, who died from the bursting of his gun when he was keeping his terms at Cambridge. The Queen honoured Count Walewski, the French ambassador, by her presence at one of the most brilliant of costume balls. A great Court ball was followed by a great Court concert, at which Lablache sang again in England after an interval of many years. Among the visitors to London in June were poor Maria da Gloria's sons, Coburgs on the father's side, young King Pedro of Portugal, and his brother, the Duke of Oporto, fine lads who were much liked wherever they went. The Queen and the Prince spent her Majesty's birthday at Osborne, and commemorated it to their children by putting them in possession of the greatest treasure of their happy childhood--the Swiss cottage in the grounds, about a mile from the Castle, in which youthful princes and princesses played at being men and women, practised the humbler duties of life, and kept natural history collections and geological specimens, as their father and uncle had kept theirs in the museum at Coburg. Another great resource consisted of the plots of ground--among which the Princess Royal's was a fair-sized garden, ultimately nine in number, where the amateur gardeners studied gardening in the most practical manner, and had their tiny tool-house, with the small spades and rakes properly grouped and duly lettered, "Prince Alfred" or "Princess Louise," as the case might be. A third idea, borrowed like the first from Coburg, was the miniature fort, with its mimic defences, every brick of which was made and built, and the very cannon-balls founded, by the two sons destined to be soldiers--the Prince of Wales and Prince Arthur.