There is a fashion in country-towns observed by ladies who go out in chairs to parties, consisting in their carrying with them some portion of their dress, to be adjusted at the locality where they are about to spend the evening. This fashion, too, is a relic of the days of Queen Charlotte. ‘On court days,’ says Miss Burney, ‘the Queen dresses her head at Kew, and puts on her drawing-room apparel at St. James’s. Her new attendant dresses all at Kew, except tippet and long ruffles, which she carries in paper to save from dusty roads.’ It was the etiquette at St. James’s that the finishing of the Queen’s dressing there should be the work of the bedchamber-woman. It consisted of little more than tying the necklace, handing the fan and gloves, and bearing the Queen’s train as she left the room. This she did alone, only as far as the anteroom; there the lady of the bedchamber became the ‘first trainbearer,’ and the poor Queen had two annoyances to put up with instead of one. From the cumbrous ceremonies of St. James’s the Queen was glad enough to escape to Kew. At the latter place, indeed, ceremony, as far as the royal family was concerned, was left outside the gates. The sovereigns were thoroughly ‘at home,’ and the Queen enjoyed a ‘country life,’ not as Marie Antoinette did, a dairymaid in diamonds, at Trianon, but as a simple English country lady. The foreigners who visited the court at this time were disgusted by the republican look which it wore. It was simple and plain enough, at Kew that is, to have pleased even Franklin. The King was really there what he was popularly called everywhere, ‘Farmer George;’ the Queen was his true dame, the plainest of the plain things around her. The children--that is, the younger portion of them--were as unaffected as their parents, and the little Princess Amelia was the fairy of the place, if one may speak of a fairy in connection with farming. However grave the King might look, through pressure of public events, the little hand of the Princess Amelia, placed by the Queen in his, always touched his heart, and a look into the child’s eyes ever brought a smile into his own. Never daughter more closely nestled in a father’s heart than Amelia did in that of George III. The Queen loved, but the King adored her. At Kew, father and child appeared more unrestrained in the hearty demonstrations of their love than elsewhere. Indeed, everything at Kew was free and unrestrained; and it was no offence there if any of the attendants _did_ pass a room the door of which was open and somebody royal within. In France, they who desired to enter an apartment in which the Queen was, scratched, but never knocked, at the door. In England, at least in Queen Charlotte’s time, the etiquette was also not to knock at, but to shake the handle of, the door. Another ceremony was observed in order to _avoid_ ceremony. When royal birthdays occurred during the Queen’s stay at Windsor the family walked on the terrace, which was crowded with