Round the childhood and youth of sovereigns, especially popular
sovereigns, a growth of stories will gather like the myths which attend on
the infancy of a nation. Such stories or myths are chiefly valuable as
showing the later tendency of the individual or people, the character and
history of the monarch or of the subjects, in accordance with which, in
reversal of the adage that makes the child father to the man, the man is,
in a new sense, father to the child, by stamping on his infancy and nonage
traits borrowed from his mature years. Mingled with the species of
legendary lore attaching to every generation, there is a foundation more
or less of authentic annals. It is as affording an example of this human
patchwork of fancy and fact, and as illustrating the impression deeply
engraved on the popular mind, that the following incidents of the Queen's
childhood and youth are given.

First, the people have loved to dwell on the close union between mother
and child. The Duchess nursed her baby--would see it washed and dressed.
As soon as the little creature could sit alone, her small table was placed
by her mother's at meals, though the child was only allowed the food fit
for her years. The Princess slept in her mother's room all through her
childhood and girlhood. In the entries in the Queen's diary at the time of
the Duchess of Kent's death, her Majesty refers to an old repeater
striking every quarter of an hour in the sick-room on the last night of
the Duchess's life--"a large watch in a tortoiseshell case, which had
belonged to my poor father, the sound of which brought back to me all the
recollections of my childhood, for I had always used to hear it at night,
but had not heard it for now twenty-three years."

When the Princess was a little older, and lessons and play alternated with
each other, she was taught to attend to the thing in hand, and finish what
she had begun, both in her studies and games. One day she was amusing