The Emperor and Empress and all the guests stood on the balcony after they returned from church--it was of course Sunday when the fête took place--and watched the procession go by. The inhabitants of each valley walked together and carried a flag bearing the name of their particular district. The cheerful, sunburnt peasants moved slowly through the beautiful gardens, men and women, marching past in their quaint picturesque dress, which, though so crude in colour, yet blended together in a riot of delightful beauty, threading in and out in a long-drawn-out line of marvellous effect. The sun glinted from the masses of opalescent beads carried on the heads of three or four hundred sturdy maidens, or lit up the wide stretch of red pompons which cut across the procession like a field of poppies, then wandered to the bright red waistcoats worn by the men, shone on the green silk aprons or the broad cerise ribbons and the wonderfully starched and plaited white cambric sleeves. Three of the women, each wearing a different costume, came up to the balcony and presented an address to the Empress, who talked with them in her usual kindly manner. The peasants were three women of great dignity and a certain nobility of manner, self-possessed and apparently not in the least intimidated. Probably in ordinary costume they might have created a different impression, and would have appeared commonplace and ordinary in type and feature; but the marvel of these peasant dresses is that the plain woman looks in them almost as well as the handsomest; they bestow a piquancy, an alluring attractiveness on the least prepossessing of womankind. In detail they exploit the bizarre, the unexpected, often the ludicrous, yet subtly blend into a complete and satisfactory whole, as incomprehensible as it is fascinating. For the rest of the day the Schloss garden was crowded with groups of peasants, some of them tiny boys and girls, all anxious to see the _Kaiserin_, and above all “_die kleine Prinzessin_,” who has always kept a very special place in the hearts of the German people. A curious rumour, one of those inexplicable tales which, though totally devoid of foundation, are yet firmly accepted and become one more of those popular errors so tenaciously held, a whispered story with regard to the Princess, with which she herself is much amused, has always been current in Germany--even in the remotest corners of the Empire--to the effect that she is deaf and dumb. How this extraordinary idea arose can never be known, for at every stage of her existence the Princess has lagged noways behind other children in volubility of expression and quickness of hearing.