Most old palaces that I have seen are conspicuous for their splendour and still more for their inconvenience--they are structurally almost incapable of being adapted to modern requirements; and the Neues Palais is no exception to this rule, though wonders have been done in the matter of the installation of adequate heating apparatus and bathrooms. Most of this work was accomplished under the superintendence and on the initiative of the late Empress Frederick, whose practical, energetic mind seems to have grappled successfully with the great problems of plumbing and domestic efficiency which present themselves with perhaps more insistence in palaces than elsewhere. But there was no way of overcoming the difficulty caused by the lack of any passage in the wing where the apartment of the Princess was situated on the first floor--the _Prinzen-Wohnung_ or Dwelling of the Princes as it is called. Here two magnificent salons had been transformed into bedrooms, one for the Princess, one for the _Ober-Gouvernante_. These were obviously originally intended for reception-rooms, having doors at each end and in the middle, and were the only means of communication between the sitting-room and dining-room, so that whoever passed from one to the other was perforce obliged to traverse the whole length of one of these rooms, unless they went downstairs and passed through the courtyard to another staircase, which was what the servants had to do in all weathers. In a smaller but very beautiful salon forming the entrance to the _Prinzen-Wohnung_ a cooking-stove had been placed in the massive marble fireplace for the purpose of keeping dishes warm, for all the food of the Palace is prepared in a kitchen situated in the “Communs,” a building on the far side of the Mopke communicating with the Palace by a long underground passage along which the dishes are brought. Here it may be pointed out that all the stables, carriages, kitchens, etc., as well as the palaces themselves, are always officially styled “royal,” not “imperial,” as they belong to the Kingdom of Prussia and are not part of the appanage of the Empire. The sitting-room I occupied first on coming to the Neues Palais remained just as it had been at the time it was built, somewhere about 1770. Its walls were covered with small irregular pieces of dark blue glass set in cement and carried up into the centre of the ceiling, in which was inserted a circle of small mirrors where at night, if one chanced to look up, one saw the lamplight reflected. Over the big marble chimneypiece, bearing the cipher of Frederick the Great, was another high mirror of the same period (Louis XV) with a golden-rayed sun fixed in its upper part. I never was able to learn the meaning of this sun, which was repeated in other palaces built by the famous King of Prussia.