ence. For ladies who had trails to manage the ordeal must
have been a trying one. Now it has been made quite easy. There is
but one point in which a presentation to the queen differs from that
already described at the prince of Wales's levee. You may turn your
back to the prince, but after bowing to the queen you step off into
the crowd, still facing her. There (if you have had the good luck to
be presented in the diplomatic circle) you may stand and watch a most
interesting pageant. To the young royalties, perhaps, it is not very
amusing, though they evidently have their little joke afterward over
anything unusual that occurs. It is natural enough that they should,
of course, and the fatigue which they sustain entitles them to all the
amusement they can get out of what must be to them a very monotonous
and familiar spectacle. There is plenty in it to occupy and interest
the man who sees it for the first or second time. You do not have to
ask "Who is this?" and "Who is that?" The lord chamberlain announces
each person as he or she appears. You hear the most heroic and
romantic names in English history as some insignificant boy or wizened
old woman appears to represent them. They are not all, by any means,
insignificant boys and wizened old women. Many of the ladies are
handsome enough to be well worth looking at, whether their names be
Percy or Stanhope or Brown or Smith. The young slips of girls who come
to be presented for the first time, frightened and pale or flushed,
one admires and feels a sense of instinctive loyalty to.

The name of each is called out loudly by the lord chamberlain: "The
duchess of Fincastle," "The countess of Dorchester," "Lady Arabella
Darling on her marriage," etc. The ladies bow very low, and those to
whom the queen gives her hand to kiss nearly or quite touch their knee
to the carpet. No act of homage to the queen ever seems exaggerated,
her behavior being so modest and the sympathy with her so wide and
sincere; but ladies very nearly kneel in shaking hands with any member
of the royal family, not only at court, but elsewhere. It is not so
strange-looking, the kneeling to a royal lady, but to see a stately
mother or some soft maiden rendering such an act of homage to a chit
of a boy or a gross young gentleman impresses one unpleasantly. The
curtsy of a lady to a prince or princess is something between kneeling
and that queer genuflection one meets in the English agricultural
districts: the