The Emperor and Empress occupied two special gilt and red-velvet chairs, and the Court ordinary cane-bottomed ones--also gilt--which made a great scraping on the floor as we rose to pray or sat down to sing according to the usual German custom. The congregation consisted chiefly of a few officers and foresters with their wives and children, and a well-meaning choir sang timidly in the gallery up above. The dining-room and neighbouring salons in Wilhelmshöhe were beautifully furnished in Empire style and in late Louis Quinze. The fine view from the windows, away over the undulating hills beyond Cassel, helped to beguile the rather wearisome standing about and half-hearted after-dinner conversation. One of the old generals who wanted to improve his English always came ponderously in my direction if he saw me glancing at some of the English fashion-papers lying on the table, as he declared himself deeply interested in “ladies’ toilettes.” I was always rather apprehensive when he turned over the leaves, looking at them carefully through his eyeglass, and when he got to the hair “transformations” usually thought it best to retire before he reached pages of a still more intimate nature. Jerome Bonaparte inhabited Wilhemshöhe for seven years when he was King of Westphalia, and introduced all the Empire sofas and chairs. The salon of the Princess was a delightful room with a parquet floor, panelled and painted white, and the mahogany furniture was upholstered in a most beautiful tone of striped yellow satin. Leading from it was the breakfast-room, with striped red-stain wall-coverings hung with pictures of the children of the House of Hesse-Cassel, to whom the Schloss belonged before they lost it by fighting against Prussia in the war of 1866. These unfortunate infants of two or three years were dressed in stuffy, heavy, thickly-embroidered garments of black and red velvet, and wore stiffly-starched, scratchy-looking ruffs round their poor little chubby necks. In Wilhelmshöhe Schloss Napoleon III. was lodged after being taken prisoner by the Germans. In the Empress’s sitting-room is the writing-table he used, with the hole burnt in it where he always laid his cigar.