In the midst of all the royalties that were present at the wedding of the Prince of Wales were the two great novelists of the realm, Thackeray and Dickens; but Tennyson, the Poet Laureate, was not there. Again "someone had blundered," and his invitation had been missent. Both the Queen and Prince Albert felt a sincere admiration and reverence for the poet, and the Prince had asked the favor of an autograph with far more hesitation than most schoolboys would have shown. This is the way in which he made his very modest petition:

"Will you forgive me if I intrude upon your leisure with a request which I have thought some little time of making, viz., that you would be good enough to write your name in the accompanying volume of the \'Idylls of the King\'?" Prince Albert was very fond of the "Idylls," and when, only a month after his death, Tennyson brought out a new edition of the poems, it contained a beautiful dedication, which began:

"These to his memory—since he held them dear."

The lines do not sound as if the poet felt obliged to write them because he had been appointed Laureate, but rather as if he meant every word that he wrote. In this dedication he speaks very earnestly of Prince Albert\'s wisdom and ability and unselfishness, and gives us the exquisite line which everyone quotes who writes of the Prince Consort:

"Wearing the white flower of a blameless life."

The following year, just before the wedding of the Prince of Wales, Tennyson wrote a welcome to the bride, beginning:

"Sea-kings\' daughter from over the sea,

Alexandra!

Saxon and Norman and Dane are we,

But all of us Danes in our welcome of thee,

Alexandra!"

The Queen was much pleased with the poem and said, "Thank him very warmly, and tell him with how much pleasure I have read the lines, and that I rejoice the sweet and charming bride should be thus greeted."

There is a story that when the Danish Princess was a very young girl, she and three of her girl friends sat together in the forest talking of what they should like to do when they were grown up.

"I want to be famous," said one. "I want to paint a picture that everyone will go to see, or to write a book that all Denmark will be eager to read."

"If I could do just what I liked," declared the second, "I would travel all over the world; so I will wish to be a great traveler."

"I want to be rich," said the third, "and then I can travel whenever I choose, and buy all the books I choose without having to write them, and all the pictures I choose without having to paint them. But what do you want, Alix?"

The Princess Alix had been thinking, and she answered slowly, "If I could have just what I wanted, I would choose that everyone who saw me should love me."

However it was with the others, the Princess Alexandra surely had her wish, for everyone who met her seemed to love her. The Queen called her "the fairy," and so great a dignitary as Dean Stanley thought of her in the same way, for after he had had a long talk with her in the corner of the drawing room, telling her how the service of the Church of England differed from that of the Danish Church, he wrote in his diary, "She is as charming and beautiful a creature as ever passed through a fairy tale." "The little gem of Denmark is the pet of the country," declared the newspapers. The unbounded admiration that had been shown to Queen Victoria in the early days of her reign was given to Alexandra. When the Queen came to the throne, young girls who were small and had fair hair and blue eyes were happy. Now, it was bliss to have any feature that resembled the Danish Princess. She had a custom of letting two curls of brown hair fall on each shoulder, and straightway English fashions demanded that every girl should wear four curls hanging on her shoulders. For months London was at the height of gayety. The Princess represented her royal mother-in-law at the drawing rooms of the season; no easy task, for so many ladies attended the first that it took four long hours for them to pass the throne. All this time the Princess Alexandra and the Princess Alice stood to receive them, except for one little resting time of twenty minutes. There were receptions and most magnificent balls, at which all the dignitaries tried their best to make themselves agreeable to the young Princess.

Of course the Queen had no heart for these festivities, but she was glad to have the people pleased, and for one of the most elaborate entertainments she sent decorations and furnishings from Buckingham Palace. The Princess Alice and Prince Louis were with her for several months before the marriage of the Prince of Wales; and only three or four weeks after the great event, a little Hessian granddaughter was born at Windsor Castle. The chaplain of the Hessian court came to England for the christening of the wee maiden. The usual number of names was given her, but the first two were Victoria Alberta.

In the autumn the Queen made the customary visit to Balmoral; but only a few days after her arrival she took an evening drive that put her into a great deal of danger, for the carriage turned over, and the Queen, the Princess Alice, and "Lenchen," as the Princess Helena was called, were thrown out. Brown, the Queen\'s favorite Highland attendant, had little regard for court manners at any time, and less than ever in this predicament. He called out, "The Lord Almighty have mercy on us! Who did ever see the like of this before! I thought you were all killed." The Queen had fallen on her face, and was somewhat bruised. Princess Alice, with her usual calmness, held a lantern so that the men could see to cut the horses free. Then while the driver went for help, the monarch of Great Britain sat in the road wrapped up in plaids and using the floor of the carriage for a back. The Princess had brought her page along, a Malay boy whose father had presented him to a traveler in return for some kindness, and little "Willem" sat in front with one lantern, while Brown held another. It was a strange situation, a Queen, with thousands of soldiers at her command, sitting in a broken carriage waiting for horses and guarded by one Highlander and a little black boy. She wrote in her journal for that day: "People were foolishly alarmed when we got upstairs, and made a great fuss. Had my head bandaged and got to bed rather late."

This soldier\'s daughter could make little of pain, but she could not so easily put away sorrow. Every place about Balmoral reminded her of something that Prince Albert had said or done, and she could not bear that his presence should be forgotten. On the summit of a hill which they had often visited together, she built a great cairn, on which was inscribed, "To the beloved memory of Albert, the great and good Prince Consort; raised by his broken-hearted widow, Victoria R."

She was touched and grateful when the citizens of Aberdeen wished to put up a statue of the Prince, and asked her to be present at the unveiling. It was nearly two years since his death, but she had not yet taken part in any public ceremony, and she dreaded to have the morning come. When it did come, however, she wrote in her journal the words that were the keynote of her courage in meeting difficulties, "Prayed for help and got up earlier." The rain poured, but the streets of Aberdeen were thronged with people. Out of sympathy with her grief, there was no cheering, and no band playing. For more than twenty-five years she had never appeared on public occasions without both cheering and music; and although she appreciated the thoughtful sympathy of the people, the silence only made the contrast greater between the past and the present. The exercises began with an address to the Queen by the Lord Provost. She handed him a written reply. Then he knelt before her; her Minister gave her a sword; and touching the Provost with it on each shoulder, she said "Rise, Sir Alexander Anderson." Mr. Anderson had now become a knight, and would be called Sir Alexander all the rest of his life. After this little ceremony, the bunting was drawn away from the statue, and what the Queen called a "fearful ordeal" was at an end.

The one upon whom the Queen depended most was Princess Alice. She often went on little picnics or drives "because Alice advised." The Princess and Prince Louis spent as much time in England as possible, and when they were in Germany the letters of the Princess gave her mother a great deal of pleasure. They were full of the details of her daily life, some of which might have come from a palace and some from a cottage. One described a gift just received from the Empress of Russia, "a splendid bracelet;" and a few days later, the young mother wrote exultantly that the baby looked about and laughed. This young housekeeper was deeply interested in all the details of her home. She was grateful to her Queen mother for the big turkey pie and the other good things that arrived at Christmas time; and she wrote of her various little dilemmas, ranging all the way from a half-hour\'s hunt for a pen just after a journey to the whirl of making the dining room into a bedroom to accommodate a guest. One morning she wrote "in the midst of household troubles," as she said, for the Emperor and Empress had just sent word that they were coming to breakfast with her, and "Louis" was out. But of all the bits of home life in her letters, those about the children—for in a year and a half there was also a little Elizabeth—must have given the most pleasure to the royal Grandmamma. On one page the Princess described some political complication between kingdoms, and on the next was the astounding news that little Victoria could get on her feet by the help of a chair and could push it across the room. Before long, she was walking out with her father before breakfast, with her independent little hands in her jacket pockets. Money was not especially plenty in the home at Darmstadt, and the Princess mother wrote at one time of the little Elizabeth\'s wearing Victoria\'s last year\'s gowns, and at another said that she had just made seven little dresses for the children. With a German father and an English mother, the little Victoria spoke at first a comical combination of German and English, and she announced one day, "Meine Grossmama, die K?nigin, has got a little vat............