chorus in Kensington Gardens, the party stood at the main door, demanding
admission. This was another and ruder summons than the musical serenade
which had been planned to wile the gentle sleeper sweetly from her slumbers
and to hail her natal day not a month before. That had been a graceful,
sentimental recognition of a glad event; this was an unvarnished, well-nigh
stern arousal to the world of grave business and anxious care, following
the mournful announcement of a death--not a birth. From this day the
Queen's heavy responsibilities and stringent obligations were to begin.
That untimely, peremptory challenge sounded the first knell to the light
heart and careless freedom of youth.

Though it had been well known that the King lay on his death-bed, and
Kensington without, as well as Kensington within, must have been in a high
state of expectation, it does not appear that there were any watchers on
the alert to rush together at the roll of the three royal carriages.
Instead of the eager, respectful crowd, hurrying into the early-opened
gates of the park to secure good places for all that was to be seen and
heard on the day of the Princess's coming of age, Palace Green seems to
have been a solitude on this momentous June morning, and the individual the
most interested in the event, after the new-made Queen, instead of being
there to pay his homage first, as he had offered his congratulations on the
birthday a year before, was far away, quietly studying at the little
university town on the Rhine.

"They knocked, they rang, they thumped for a considerable time before they
could rouse the porter at the gate," says Miss Wynn, in the "Diary of a
Lady of Quality," of these importunate new-comers. "They were again kept
waiting in the courtyard, then turned into one of the lower rooms, where
they seemed forgotten by everybody. They rang the bell and desired that the
attendant of the Princess Victoria might be sent to inform Her Royal