clearly the progress of civilization.
To-day a woman dragged down by her husband's fall is screened.

Not so in Elizabeth Stuart's time. The press of that day lampooned her
more unmercifully than it did her unfortunate consort. Cruel cartoons,
picturing her in a beggar's dress were scattered broadcast. King James
I. offered his daughter an asylum in England, but she answered proudly:
"My place while I live is by my husband's side. I shall never forsake
him."

So intense was Elizabeth's love for her husband that it practically
crowded out all other love except the love for her dead brother. Even of
her children she said: "I love them more because they are his than for
themselves or for my own comfort." For three days after Frederick's
death Elizabeth neither spoke nor ate nor wept. To the day of her own
death, her room, sometimes a pitifully poor room for a king's daughter
and a king's wife, was draped in black in memory of her husband.

The eldest daughter of Elizabeth and Frederick also an Elizabeth was a
diligent student of philosophy. Descartes honored her with his
friendship. For many years she corresponded with the great philosopher.
In youth, this Elizabeth was very pretty a vivacious, black-haired,
brown-eyed beauty, with a slender aquiline nose which tried her sorely
by turning unbecomingly red at times. The poverty-stricken Palatine
princesses, living as poor relations, first at this court, then at that,
kept up courage by sharpening their wits on one another. One day when
the annoying nose was blushing, Elizabeth's next younger sister, Louise,
said: "Come, it is time to attend the audience of our cousin, the
Queen," and Elizabeth answered aggrievedly: "Do you expect me to go with
this nose?" To which quick-witted Louise replied: "Do you expect me to
wait until you grow another one?"

Elizabeth, perhaps to gain leisure to study her beloved subject,
philosophy, entered the Lutheran convent at Herfort, becoming later its
abbess. Louise became abbess of a Catholic convent at Naubisson, and a
very lively and comfortable, if not exactly moral, abbess she made. A
third sister, Henrietta, took to preserves instead of either philosophy
or religion. She married, and lived happily ever after among her sticky
pots and kettles. Not the least blessed of the three, to judge from her
letters, was the lot of practical Henrietta.

At the end of the Thirty Years' War, Germany lay prostrate, bleeding at
a thousand wounds. T