There is a royal palace familiar to many of us of which the courts are shining and busy, and crowded with people. Flowers are growing among fountains and foliage, and children are at play; there is a sight of high gabled roofs overhead enclosing it, so do the long lines of the ancient arcades. Some music is playing to which the children are dancing. In this strange little world the children seem to grow up to music in beautiful ready-made little frocks and pinafores, the grown-up people seem to live on grapes and ices and bonbons, and on the enormous pears displayed in the windows of the cafes. Everything is more or less gilt and twinkling,--china flowers bloom delicate and scentless; it would seem as if the business of life consisted in wandering here and there, and sipping and resting to the sound of music in the shade of the orange-trees, and gazing at the many wonders displayed; at the gimcracks and trinkets and strings of beads, the precious stones, and the silver and gold, and the fanciful jewels. Are these things all dust and ashes? Here are others, again, of imitation dross and dust, shining and dazzling too; and again, imitations of imitations for the poorest and most credulous, heaped up in harmless glitter and array. Here are opera-glasses to detect the deceptions, and the deceptions to deceive the glasses,--bubbles of pomp, thinnest gilding of vanity and good-humour. Some twenty years ago Dorothea Vanborough and a great many ladies and gentlemen her contemporaries were not the respectable middle-aged people they are now, but very young folks standing on tip-toe to look at life, which they gazed at with respectful eyes, believing all things, hoping all things, and interested in all things beyond words or the power of words to describe. My heroine was a blooming little girl, with her thick wavy hair plaited into two long tails. She wore a great flapping hat and frilled trousers, according to the barbarous fashion of the time. Little Rhoda was shorter and slighter, with great dark eyes and a wistful pale face; she was all shabbily dressed, and had no frills like Dolly, or flowers in her hat. The two stood gazing at the portrait of a smiling little Prince with a blue ribbon, surmounted by a wreath of flowers, glazed and enclosed in a gilt-locket. I suppose the little girls of the present[1] bear the same sort of allegiance to the Prince Imperial that Dolly felt for the little smiling Count of Paris of those days. For the King his grandfather, for the Dukes and Princes his uncles, hers was a very vague devotion; but when the old yellow royal coaches used to come by rumbling and shaking along the Champs Elysees, Dolly for one, followed by her protesting attendant, would set off running as hard as she could, and stand at the very edge of the pavement in the hopes of seeing her little smiling Prince peep out of the carriage-window. He was also to be seen in effigy on cups, on pin-boxes, and bonbons, and, above