Yesterday afternoon we were at Schmiedeberg. We went to see a very interesting carpet-manufactory, worked by hand, and all by girls, and a very simple process, much like making fringe, which you used to do and then make footstools of after Beatrice’s birth.
Yesterday our wedding-day—already seven years ago—made me think so much of Osborne, and of you, darling Mama, and of all that passed during that time. It was a quiet wedding in a time of much sorrow, and I often think how trying it must have been for you.
Kranichstein, July 21st.
Yesterday after eighteen hours’ very hot railway journey, we arrived here all well. Many thanks for your letter, which I received at Dresden. It was impossible to write, as I had to pay visits and to see things during those two days.
The Crown Prince and Princess received us at the station; the following day we paid our visits. I found Marie[93] in bed looking very well, and her baby, tied up in a cushion, seemed a nice child. Her other children are very pretty; the eldest girl is like George, and the little one has a quantity of fair curls, like Louis of Portugal’s boy. In the afternoon of that day the King and Queen came to see us, and were very kind. She is very like the Queen Dowager of Prussia, her twin sister, and her other sister, Queen Marie, is very like her twin sister, Archduchess Sophie. As they are first cousins, and very fond ones, of my father-in-law, they consider themselves of course as our aunts.
I went to see the picture-gallery, which has some exquisite pictures, though the Sistine Madonna surpasses all others, and the famous Holbein, of which the Dresden gallery has been for long so proud, is now recognized as a copy, and the one that belongs to my mother-in-law as the original. We visited the Grüne Gewöbel [the Green Vaults], where the magnificent jewels and other treasures are preserved, and the King was kind enough to lead us over the rest of the castle himself, including his own rooms, in one of which the life-size pictures of his last four daughters (all dead) stand, of whom he cannot speak without tears. How dreadfully he and the poor Queen must have suffered these last years!
Uncle Louis is at Friedberg and intends remaining there all next month, till the manœuvres are over. Alice Morier will accompany me.
Kranichstein, July 25th.
Thousand thanks for your kind letter which I received yesterday, at the same time that the beautiful christening present for Ernest arrived! Thousand thanks for this most beautiful and precious gift for our boy, from Louis and from myself! We are so pleased with it! It is to be exhibited here, and it will interest and delight all who see it, I am sure.
I have just received a letter from Bertie, announcing his arrival here for the 28th. We shall be greatly pleased to see them all; but we have so little room, and our house in town is all shut up and under repair, so that we shall have some trouble to make them comfortable and shall be quite unable to do it as we should wish. But I trust they will be lenient and put up with what we can offer.