Last night there was an entertainment at the castle and among the guests a chief of one of those smaller Indias that cluster about the great one. He wore his own splendid trappings, and he was a handsome fellow, well set up; and above his keen dark face, in front of the turban, set round with big irregular pearls, was fastened a miniature of the Queen-Empress who holds his fealty in her hand. To him the Princess, all in filmy lace with her diadem flashing, spoke kindly. They sat upon gold-backed chairs a little way apart, and as she leaned to confer her smile and he to receive it, I longed to frame the picture and make perpetual the dramatic moment, the exquisite odd chance. “Surely,” thought I, “the world has never been so graciously bridged before.” Talking of George Washington, if the good man could have seen that, I think he might have melted toward princesses; I do not think, from all we know of him, that he would have had the heart to turn coldly away and disclaim responsibility for this one. I wish he could have seen it; yes, and Martha too, though if anybody thought necessary to make trouble and talk about sacred principles of democracy, it would have been Martha. Martha, she would have been the one. Her great and susceptible husband would have taken a philosophic pinch of snuff and toasted posterity. I see that I have already admitted it, I have slipped in the path of virtuous resolution and lofty indifference; I have gone back, just for a minute, into the world. The reason I have neglected every flower in the garden this morning to write about the Princess is that I have been dining with her. It is so difficult to be unmoved and firm when you know the band will play and there will be silver soup-plates, to say nothing of the Roy-Regent smiling and pleased to see you, and the Roman punch in the middle of the menu. At home, one so seldom has Roman punch in the middle of the menu. Besides, now that I think of it, it was a “command” invitation, and I did not go for any of these reasons, or even to see the Princess, but because I had to; a lofty compulsion of State was upon me, and nobody would place her loyalty in question on account of a possible draught. If there had been a draught and I had taken cold I should have felt an added nobility to-day; somewhat the virtue, I suppose, of the elderly statesman who contracts a fatal influenza at a distinguished interment, and so creates a vicious circle of funerals; but there was no draught.