lowed "England's
England-loving daughter" to her foreign home, where she led a
beautiful, useful life, treading in her father's footsteps, and
continually cherished by the love of her mother; and the peculiarly
touching manner of her death, a sort of martyrdom to sweet domestic
affections, again stirred the heart of her own people to mournful
admiration. A cottager's wife might have died as Princess Alice died,
through breathing in the poison of diphtheria as she hung, a
constant, loving nurse, over the pillows of her suffering husband and
children. This beautiful _homeliness_ that has marked the lives of
our Sovereign and her children has been of inestimable value, raising
simple human virtues to their proper pre-eminence before the eyes of
the English people of to-day, who are very materially, if often
unconsciously, swayed by the example set them in high places.

In the May after Prince Consort's death the second International
Exhibition was opened, amid sad memories of the first, so joyful in
every way, and a certain sense of discouragement because the golden
days of universal peace seemed farther off than ten years before.

"Is the goal so far away?
Far, how far no tongue can say;
Let us dream our dream to-day."

Far indeed it seemed, with the fratricidal contest raging in America,
and shutting out all contributions to this World's Fair from the
United States.

[Illustration: The Mausoleum.]

The Queen had betaken herself that May to her Highland home, whose
joy seemed dead, and where her melancholy pleased itself in the
erection of a memorial cairn to the Prince on Craig Lorigan, after
she had returned from Princess Alice's wedding. But in May she had
sent for Dr. Norman Macleod, who was not only distinguished as one of
her own chaplains, but was also a friend already endeared to the
Prince and herself; and she found comfort in the counsels of that
faithful minister and loyal man, who has left some slight record of
her words. "She said she never shut her eyes to trials, but liked to
look them in the face; she would never shrink from duty, but all was
at present done mechanically; her highest ideas of purity and love
were obtained from the Prince, and God could not be displeased with
her love.... There was nothing morbid in her grief.... She said that
the Prince always believed he was to die soon, and that he often told
her that he had never any fear of death." It seemed that in this