three towered, almost without the drooping heaviness of age, till his
seventy-ninth year. Notwithstanding the adverse comparison with his
parent, one has but to see Gustave's face, with its determination and
refinement, to feel a certain assurance as to Sweden's future.

It is a curious fact that there has been such a dearth of girls in the
Swedish royal family, the only princess of the house being the Crown
Princess of Denmark, a daughter of the late King Charles XV. The
present queen has only sons: Crown Prince Gustavus Adolphus, wedded to
Margaret of Connaught; Prince Wilhelm, who was recently married to
the Russian Princess Marie Palvona, and Prince Erik, now about twenty
years of age. The present Crown Prince and Princess are seemingly
perpetuating the tradition, as their first child is a lusty little
son.

Queen Victoria is said to be endowed with an instinct for business of
every kind far finer and more efficient than that of her husband, and
it is to be regretted that her health is so frail that she is obliged
to spend much time outside her husband's realm, and the duties of her
royal dignity devolve upon her daughter-in-law, the Crown Princess.
It is very satisfying to the Swedish people that by a strange play
of circumstances, the claims of the extinct House of Vasa,--the last
direct descendant of which passed away a few days after King Oscar,
in the person of Carola, Dowager-Queen of Saxony, and daughter of the
deposed King Gustavus Adolphus IV of Sweden,--are again restored, and
that the reigning House of Bernadotte and the ancient House of Vasa
have become joined through the present Crown Prince. It is something
to consider, too, that Adolphus V is the first of the Bernadotte
dynasty in whose veins, through his mother, Sophie of Nassau, there
flows royal blood.[k]