At all other court entertainments ladies are present.  Of course there are a great many very pretty ones, and their brilliant toilets increase the magnificence of the spectacle.  The queen’s levees are very much longer than those of the prince of Wales.  Then, at all ceremonials where there are ladies, men are compelled to wear, as I have said, silk stockings and knee-breeches, slippers and shoe-buckles.  One can support this costume in tolerable comfort in a warm room, but in getting from the carriage to the door it is often like walking knee-deep in a tub of cold water.  A cold hall or a draught from an open door will give very unpleasant sensations.  In many of the large rooms of the palaces huge fireplaces, with great logs of wood, roar behind tall brass fenders.  Once in front of one of these, the courtier who isn’t a Scotchman feels as if he would never care to go away.  Fortunately, most of these ceremonials are in summer, but the first of them come in February, and London is often cool well up into June.

The ceremony of a presentation to the queen is quite the same as that at a prince of Wales’s levee.  The spelling-class of royal ladies stand up in a rigid row.  On the queen’s right is the lord chamberlain, who reads off the names.  Next to the queen, on her left, is Alexandra, then the queen’s daughters and the Princess Mary of Cambridge.  Next to them stand the princes, and the whole is a phalanx which stretches entirely across the room.  Behind this line, drawn up in battle array, stand three or four ranks of court ladies.

The act of presentation is very easy and simple.  Formerly—­indeed, until within a few years—­it must have been a very perilous and important feat.  The courtier (the term is used inaccurately, but there is no noun to describe a person who goes to court for a single time) was compelled to walk up a long room, and to back, bowing, out of the queen’s presence.  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