winter days with wonder, admiration, and interest.

Yet all the pleasant stir and excitement; the new member of the family
prominent for a brief space; the gifts, the trousseau, the wedding-cake,
the wedding guests, were but the deceptive herald of change and loss to
the family, whose members were so few that each became deeply precious.
The closely united circle was to be broken, and a dear face permanently
withdrawn from the group. The Duchess of Kent's elder daughter, Princess
Victoria's only sister, was about to marry. It was the most natural and
the happiest course, above all when the Princess Feodora wedded
worthily--how worthily let the subsequent testimony of the Queen and the
Prince Consort prove. It was given at the time of the Prince of
Hohenlohe's death, thirty-two years afterwards, in 1860.

The Queen wrote to her own and her sister's uncle, the King of the
Belgians, in reference to the Prince of Hohenlohe: "A better, more
thoroughly straightforward, upright, and excellent man, with a more
unblemished character, or a more really devoted and faithful husband,
never existed."

The Prince Consort's opinion of his brother-in-law is to be found in a
letter to the Princess William of Prussia: "Poor Ernest Hohenlohe is a
great loss. Though he was not a man of great powers of mind, capable of
taking comprehensive views of the world, still he was a great character
--that is to say, a thoroughly good, noble, spotless, and honourable man,
which in these days forms a better title to be recognised as great than do
craftiness, Machiavellism, and grasping ambition."

At the time of his marriage the Prince of Hohenlohe was in the prime of
manhood, thirty-two years of age.