This joyful news, as unexpected as it was welcome, came opportunely to heighten the festivity and rejoicings at the wedding of the princesses.

When the king has reached the center of the room, he stops, turns with great dignity and bows first to one chamber and then to the other, and then to the queen, who has taken her position in the balcony, attended by the princesses and other members of the royal family and the officers of the court.

This, however, did not prevent the princesses, on their withdrawing, from kneeling to the ground in order to show their respect for the son of the King of France.

Queens, princesses, and ladies of the nobility wore in addition a long cloak lined with ermine, or a tunic with or without sleeves; often, too, their dress consisted of two tunics, and of a veil or drapery, which was thrown over the head and fell down before and behind, thus entirely surrounding the neck.

The satin bills of their majesties and the princesses were then duly displayedand the dingy green curtain drew up.

Upon the whole, the change was not one which conduced to comfort; and I have heard that the princesses wept when they quitted their snug boudoirs in the Queen's Lodge.

The ancient British women mingled in the wars of their husbands, and their princesses were trained to the use of arms in the Maiden's Castle at Edinburgh and in the Isle of Skye.

ALTESSE, f., titre d'honneur donné aux princes et aux princesses.

Princesses & peasant boys; tales of enchantment.

He lost his temper at his coronation on perceiving that some of the princesses of his family who were to act as trainbearers were not in their right places.

But upon referring to the pages of Charlevoix (264) we find that these statements, while perfectly true, do not refer to the Natchez women in general, but only to the princesses, or "female suns."

The privileges conferred on the princesses thus appear like a coarse, topsy-turvy joke, while affording one more instance of the lowest degradation of woman.

BAYADÈRES AND PRINCESSES

They either made their heroines bayadères, or princesses, or girls willing to be married in a way allowing them their own choice, but not reputed respectable.

Princesses, again, were favorite heroines, for various reasons, one of which was the tradition concerning the custom called Svayamvara or "Maiden's Choice"a princess being "permitted," after a tournament, to "choose" the victor.

Apart from the fantasticality of this episode, it is obvious that even if the Svayamvara was once a custom in royal circles it did not really insure to the princesses free choice of a rational kind.

The seven princesses used to bathe daily in a tank and when they bathed they used to put the scrapings from their bodies in a hole in the ground.

At last a miserable, poverty stricken and sickly cowherd was asked; he had always grazed his cattle on the banks of the tank and had often seen the princesses bathing so he knew from what the tree had spring.

" The princesses had entered the king's closet; they were weeping and making a noise.

"The Infanta must be started off, and by coach too, to get it over sooner," exclaimed Count Morville, who had been ordered by Madame de Prie to draw up a list of the marriageable princesses in Europe.

Never was royal blood or the inheritance of a crown threaded through divergent veins to its source with more care and pride than the lineage of these four-footed "princes" and "princesses," "dukes" and "duchesses," and "knights" and "ladies" of the stable and pasture.

Now, also, audiences were held, and Josephine and Hortense already had a court retinue who approached them with the same subserviency and humility as though they had been princesses of the blood.

There are also the cousins Pyrocles and Musidorus, son and nephew respectively to Euarchus, king of Thessaly, who have arrived in quest of the princesses' loves, and have obtained positions near the objects of their affection, the one disguised as an Amazon under the name of Zelmane, the other seeking service under Dametas and assuming the name of Dorus.

At length all is arranged, the princesses consenting to accompany their lovers in flight, and the various guardians being cleverly duped.

Not all the characters are consistently revolting, several, including the princesses, having at times a fine flavour of piquant roguishness, at others a touch of easy sentiment.