crescent, holding the dim promise of full-orbed womanhood and Queenhood.

As the Princess grew older, she found loving and helpful companionship in
her half-brother and sister, Prince Charles and the Princess Feodore of
Leiningen, the three children and their mother forming a close family
union, which years and separations and changes of fortune never
destroyed. They are all gone from her now; the Queen, as daughter and
sister, stands alone.

A kind friend and a well-known English writer, F. Aiken Kortright, for
many years a resident of Kensington, tells some pleasant little local
stories of the Princess Victoria. She says: "In her childhood the
Princess Victoria was frequently seen in a little carriage, drawn over
the gravel-walks of the then rural Kensington Gardens, accompanied by her
elder and half-sister, the Princess Feodore, and attended by a single
servant. Many elderly people still remember the extreme simplicity of the
child's attire, and the quiet and unpretentious appearance and manners of
her sister, who was one day seen to stop the tiny carriage to indulge the
fancy of an unknown little girl by allowing her to kiss her future
Queen."

That "unknown little girl" was an elder sister of Miss Kortright. My
friend also says that the Duchess of Kent and her daughters frequently on
summer afternoons took tea on the lawn, "in sight of admiring
promenaders, with a degree of publicity which now sounds fabulous."

It was then safe and agreeable for that quiet, refined family, only
because the London "Rough"--that ugly, unwholesome, fungous growth on the
fine old oak of English character--had not made his unwelcome appearance
in all the public parks of the metropolis. Our friend also states that so