There was a good reason for staying at home in the early summer. The family
entertained friends: not merely valued, kinsfolk, but visitors who might
change the whole current of a life's history and deeply influence a destiny
on which the hopes of many hearts were fixed, that concerned the well-being
of millions of the human race. Princess Victoria had not grown up solitary
in her high estate. It has been already pointed out that she was one in a
group of cousins with whom she had cordial relations. But the time was
drawing near when nature and policy alike pointed to the advisability of
forming a closer tie, which would provide the Princess with companionship
and support stretching beyond those of her mother, and, if it were well and
wisely chosen, afford the people further assurance that the first household
in the kingdom should be such as they could revere. The royal maiden who
had been educated so wisely and grown up so simply and healthfully, was
approaching her seventeenth birthday. Already there were suitors in store
for her hand; as many as six had been seriously thought of--among them,
Prince Alexander of the Netherlands, whose suit was greatly favoured by
King William; Duke Ernest of Wurtemberg; Prince Adalbert of Prussia; and
Prince George of Cambridge. Prince George of Cumberland was _hors de
combat_, apart from the Duke of Cumberland's pretensions and the
alienation caused by them. Prince George, when a baby, had lost the sight
of one eye, a misfortune which his father shared. A few years later in the
son's boyhood, as he was at play in the gardens of Windsor Castle, he began
to amuse himself with flinging into the air and catching a long silk purse
with heavy gold tassels, when the purse fell on the seeing eye, inflicting
such an injury as to threaten him with total blindness. The last
catastrophe was brought about by the blunder of a famous German oculist
after Prince George had become Crown Prince of Hanover.

How much the Princess knew or guessed of those matrimonial prospects, how
far they fluttered her innocent heart, we cannot tell; but as of all the