The Prince and Princess of Prussia paid a visit to England in August, arriving on the 10th and leaving on the 29th, by which time the Court had retired to Osborne. On the 30th, after spending two days in Edinburgh, the Queen and her family arrived at Balmoral. “We found the house finished,” writes the Queen in her Diary, “as well as the offices, and the poor old house gone!”[287] It was a stormy, tempestuous holiday, but the Queen made the best of it. On the 21st of September Sir James Clark introduced Miss Florence Nightingale to the Queen, who was greatly charmed with her, and with whom her Majesty held grave consultations as to the reforms that were needed in military hospitals. The coronation of the Czar at Moscow, on the 7th of September, was attended by Lord Granville as the Queen’s representative, and when his reports reached Balmoral, Prince Albert, in a letter to Stockmar, said that they regarded these as “an apotheosis and homage paid to the vanquished, and which cannot fail to inspire both worshipper and worshipped with dangerous illusions in regard to the real state of things.” The Queen was now getting alarmed as to the carrying out of the Treaty of Peace. She saw Russia making strenuous efforts to separate France and England. Instead of restoring Kars to the Turks, the Russians demolished the fortifications, and prolonged their military occupation of the country in defiance of the Treaty of Paris. They tried to filch Serpent Island at the mouth of the Danube, under the pretext that it was inside the new line of their frontier. They sought to push their new frontier as far south as Lake Jalpuk, because the Powers, misled by a faulty map, had permitted them to retain the Moldavian town of Bolgrad.[288] In each case the Emperor of the French was inclined to support the Russian claim. The British fleet was therefore ordered to occupy the Black Sea till the deadlock was ended, and when Chreptovitch, the new Russian ambassador, threatened to leave England because this step had been taken, Lord Palmerston coolly told him “the sooner he did so the better,” if he did not mean to give England satisfaction.[289] The King of Prussia now began to press the Queen to interfere in a quarrel between him and the Swiss Republic. Neuenburg or Neufchâtel, by dynastic inheritance, had come into the possession of Frederick I. in 1707. In 1806 it was ceded to Napoleon, who gave it to Berthier, the most diplomatic of his generals. After the Great Peace it was granted an oligarchic constitution, [Illustration: VIEW IN BERNE.]