The _Bauern-Haus_ remained for several years a centre of joyous-hearted hospitality and reckless and extravagant cookery. Once the two cousins of the Princess came over from Glienicke to help to prepare supper, accompanied by a French governess and an elegantly-attired tutor in a top-hat and frock-coat. There was no place in our cookery scheme into which the tutor fitted. So we sent him and the French lady to walk about the gardens together, while the children, in a glow of enthusiasm, sat down to peel potatoes for an Irish stew. Prince Leopold (the cousin) insisted--in spite of advice to the contrary--in also trying to peel the onions; but after weeping copious tears over the first one, allowed somebody else to finish. Besides the stew, we had chops, poached eggs, pancakes, and lemonade. The Empress, in a very light, elegant toilette, arrived at an acute stage of activity, when every child was running, shrieking, clattering glasses, or spilling water, while the sputter of chops and pancakes and the reek of their frying filled the small kitchen to repletion. Fortunately we had long since been supplied with full-sized cooking utensils and the doll-things had been scrapped. A heavy thunderstorm once threatened at the very moment when the supper had reached the culminating point of perfection. We had fried our pancakes (they were a favourite dish and always appeared on the _menu_) to the accompaniment of rumbles of thunder and blue flashes of lightning, but the Princess ignored the gathering storm, absorbed in the mixing of her batter and the smoothness of her potato _purée_. As I emerged in a decidedly heated state from the kitchen, I caught a mental picture, which still remains in my memory, of a protesting footman standing on the veranda pointing to the darkened heavens, and of the Princess with a fork in her hand, which she flourished in one hand towards the sky (like another Ajax defying the lightning), while she emphatically refused to return to the house before supper was eaten. “Our _beautiful_ supper,” she said: “no, I _won’t_ go in. The storm’s nothing. It’s going over.” Crashes of thunder punctuated the sentence. A harassed _Ober-Gouvernante_ appeared round the bushes and commanded our instant return to the palace; but after several minutes of heated discussion the storm actually did pass over, and our supper was eaten to the sound of its faint rumbling retreat towards the river. Another time we ventured to make vanilla-ice, and sent to the kitchen for the ice-machine. As we were mixing the milk and eggs and vanilla flavouring, four white-capped cooks in their spotless kitchen livery were seen dragging along some sort of wheeled vehicle on which reposed the heavy ice-machine, which we found to our astonishment to be an apparatus almost as large as a piano.