With midnight comes supper, served in two adjacent underground rooms, that owe their excavation to the grim hobby of the old Duke.  All the festive party sit down to supper at the same time, the Duke’s French chef providing the menu.  The house-steward presides and proposes the health of the ducal family.  This is welcomed in the manner it deserves and then dancing is resumed in the picture-gallery.

On another evening the children on the Welbeck estate are invited to a party when the head of a giant Christmas-tree is reared in the centre of the ball-room, laden with toys for distribution to them, and the pleasures of the entertainment are varied with the tricks of a conjurer and ventriloquist.  Thus is afforded a glimpse of the happy relations existing between the Portland family and their retainers.

In the neighbourhood of Sutton-in-Ashfield, Cresswell, and the mining district between Mansfield and Worksop the Duchess is regarded as a Princess Bountiful in reality, rather than a creation of fairyland.  Her visits to some of the homes of the miners are generally unexpected; for instance one Monday morning in the late autumn she rode up to the unpretending dwelling of a collier to enquire about “an old friend,” as she called him, who had worked in Cresswell pits.  A few years before he had met with an accident and injured his spine.  The occurrence came to the ears of her Grace, who arranged for the patient to visit London to undergo an operation, which he did, with favourable results.  A bath-chair was obtained for him and since then she had evinced sympathetic interest in his condition.

As may well be imagined appeals to the Duchess’s sympathies are made from all quarters.  One day she is taking the chair at the annual meeting of the Children’s Hospital at Nottingham.  On another day the Nottingham Samaritan Hospital for Women is having her support in the opening of a bazaar in its aid.

Not only suffering humanity, but suffering brute creation has found in her a sympathetic chord.  The Bev.  H. Russell, who is well known in the county for his efforts on behalf of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, told two interesting stories of her Grace in her presence at the opening of the bazaar.

A show of cab-horses and costermongers’ donkeys was being held in Nottingham, when Mr. Russell called the attention of the Duchess to an old rag-and-bone dealer, who had won no prize, but who was known to treat his donkey humanely.

“What shall I give him?” asked the Duchess.

“Half a sovereign will be enough, I should think,” replied the clergyman.

She then handed the money to the man, but she had to borrow it though, “and,” added Mr. Russell, “I do not know whether she ever paid it back but the result was the same.”

When in Scotland once she found that a man with a cart-load of herrings had been using a piece of barbed wire to flog his horse with.