smudgy, but feeling that they had had an unusually good time. CHAPTER VII DONAU-ESCHINGEN AND METZ The time came very soon when Prince Joachim was sent away, the victim of acute home-sickness, to join his brothers in Ploen; and it was then resolved that the Princess, who felt his absence keenly, should be also provided with the necessary stimulus and society of children of her own age. From the _Augusta-Stift_, an aristocratic ladies’ school in Potsdam in which the Empress was much interested, three suitable young maidens of good family were chosen. Every morning they were fetched at half-past seven by a royal carriage and brought to the New Palace, where they shared the lessons and games of the Princess until half-past twelve, when they were reconducted to their _Stift_. It was fondly hoped by the ladies of the Court that this arrangement would put a stop to the constant interruption of lessons--a hope which was scarcely realized, for it made not the slightest difference. Girls in high-class German schools lead a very different life to those in similar institutions in England. They must all wear uniform, ugly for choice; they must have their hair plaited in the tightest, most uncompromising of plaits, which is not allowed to hang down, but is pinned by multitudinous hairpins into a hard knob. Their whole existence is absorbed in the acquisition of knowledge, and the exercise they take is a matter not of pleasure but of health. If they do anything naughty, or are untidy, they wear ribbon rosettes whose colours show nicely-graduated degrees of infamy, and they must weep bitterly when they don’t know their lessons, and ask forgiveness for a failure to indicate the exact position of Kamschatka. They are usually nice, happy, pleasant-mannered girls, expert at making _Knixes_, those quaint little German curtsies which seem to carry one back into Jane Austen’s books. They kiss the hands of their elders, and as soon as they are _confirmiert_ and leave school, blossom out into very fashionably-dressed, handsome young women, with hair done in the latest fashion, and a decided _penchant_ for young lieutenants. Their highest ambition is to be _verlobt_ as soon as possible, and they never turn their thoughts again in the direction of Kamschatka or any other part of the globe existing beyond their immediate sphere of observation. They make excellently self-sacrificing wives and mothers, and help to preserve in their husbands that attitude of infallibility which is the peculiar prerogative of German mankind. They invariably converse fairly well in English and French, and are able to quote Goethe, Schiller and Shakespeare in a manner which, if a little mechanical, still gives an agreeable impression of culture and is some relief from the domestic pursuits which, after marriage, they fulfil with praiseworthy ardour. They are as opposed to the self-possessed, slangy, sporting English schoolgirl with her multifarious ambitions as can well be imagined.