When the Colonel, with Jasmine as his dummy partner, had beaten his wife and the Prince, he became jovial, and there being still half an hour before the Prince had to compose his excitement prior to going to bed, a game of ludo was suggested. This would have been a better game if Prince Adalbert had not wanted to change the colour of his counters all the time, which made it difficult to know who was winning, and impossible to say who had really won. The Colonel, after humouring him in the first game, grew interested in a big lead he had established with Red in the second game and objected to the Prince's desire to change him into Green. It was in vain that Jasmine and her aunt offered him Yellow or Blue: he was determined to have Red, and when the Colonel declined to surrender his lead, the Prince decided that the game was tiddly-winks, which caused it to break up in confusion. Prince Adalbert was really too idiotic to be bearable for long. Living in the same house with him was like living on terms of equality with a spoilt monkey. There were times, of course, when his intelligence approximated to human intelligence, one expression of which was a passion for collecting. It began by his going down to the kitchen when the servants were occupied elsewhere and collecting the material and utensils for the preparation of dinner. Not much damage was done on this occasion, except that the unbaked portion of a Yorkshire pudding was concealed in the piano. On another occasion he collected all Jasmine's clothes and hid them under his bed. Aunt Mildred evinced a tendency to blame Jasmine for this, even going so far as to suggest that she had encouraged him to collect her clothes, though in what way this encouragement was deduced except from Jasmine's usual untidiness was not made clear. Snelson was ordered to keep a sharper look out on his master, as it was feared that from collecting inside the house, he might begin to collect outside the house, which, as the Colonel said, would be an intolerable bore. The passion for collecting was soon after this exchanged for a desire to cohabit with owls, the Prince having observed on one of his drives a tame owl in a wicker cage outside a small fruiterer's shop. The owner of the bird was persuaded to part with it at a price, and the Prince drove home in a state of perfect bliss with his pet on the opposite seat. "It's really lovely to watch him," said Aunt Mildred. "Never known him so mad about anything as His Serene Highness is now about owls," said Snelson. "He'll sit and talk to that owl by the hour together."