While they consume their coffee and cake, the Princess directs her footman to draw down all the blinds of the big salon, so as to shut out the two-o’clock winter daylight and create a proper background for the twinkling lights on the tree, which are all reflected from the mirrors of the room. On a table are spread out a complete suit of clothing for each child, not excepting boots and stockings, a large basket of provisions, containing among other things some of those famous German sausages, _Leber-Wurst_ and _Blut-Wurst_, besides coffee, sugar, _Pfeffer-Kuchen_ and other Christmas delicacies. There is always a large doll on each side of the table supported by the heap of clothing and staring into the middle distance with the usual doll-like look of vacuity. The _Ober-Gouvernante_ and one or two of the ladies of the Empress are always present, and the Princess professes to feel very nervous, though there is little sign of it in her greeting of the shy little mites, when the big doors are opened by the footmen and they creep in with their mother, almost overcome with the beauty and the wonder of it all. Hand in hand they stand in front of the tree, the light shining on their little pinched faces, and together repeat the _Weihnachts-Geschichte_, the Bible story of the first Christmas, which every well-brought-up German child, rich or poor, learns as soon as it can lisp. Sometimes, with much nervous twisting of clean pinafores, they even sing a carol in a breathless, desperate kind of way. Everybody feels relieved when this ordeal is safely over and the childish voices with their nasal twang have ceased. Then the Princess tells them it was very nice, and taking them by the hand leads them up to the tree and shows them the shoes and stockings and dresses and dolls, while the rest of us draw aside and leave them together a little. Almost invariably the children are taken into the bedroom of the Princess to try on the new dresses to see if they fit, and presently emerge to gratify our eyes with their beauty. After a while they depart, usually carrying the dolls and some of the clothes and provisions, but leaving the bulk of them, including the tree, to be brought next morning to the place where they live by the _Commissions-Wagen_ of the Palace, which is always on the road to or from Potsdam in those terribly busy weeks. Different children were, of course, invited every year, and this pleasant custom continued until the Princess was seventeen years of age, when she began to share her mother’s charities. In her earlier days, the names of the children were of the greatest interest, and she was delighted with two who bore the unusual patronymic of Ballschuh.