ring on the finger. Her hands, by the by, are very pretty--the backs
dimpled and the fingers delicately shaped. She was particular to have her
hair dressed exactly as she wore it at the ceremony every time she sat."

The Queen in her writings says very little of this portion of her
"strange, eventful history,"--a time so filled with incident, so gilded
with romance, so bathed in poetry, so altogether splendid in the eyes of
all the world; for to her, life--or all which was most "happy and
glorious" in life--began and ended with Prince Albert. She even speaks
with regret of that period of single queenliness, and says: "A worse
school for a young girl--one more detrimental to all natural feelings and
affections--cannot well be imagined than the position of a Queen at
eighteen without experience and without a husband to guide and support
her. This the Queen can state from painful experience, and she thanks God
that none of her own dear daughters are exposed to such danger."

Human nature is rash and young-woman-nature ambitious and ill-disposed to
profit by the costly experience of eld, and I doubt not the clever
Princess Royal or the proud and fair Princess Louise would have mounted
any throne in Christendom "without alarm." Most of Her Majesty's loyal
subjects deny that any harm came to her from her unsupported position as
Queen Regnant, or that she was capable of being thus harmed--but the
Queen knows best.

The Princess Victoria was a proud, high-spirited girl, and it were no
treason to suppose that at the first she had a sense of relief when the
leading-strings, in which she had been so long held, were cut, though by
the scissors of Atropos, and she was free to stand and go alone. Her good
mother, becoming at once an object of political jealousy, removed herself
from the old close companionship, though retaining in her heart the old