The queen expressed no desire to see Walpole, but he sought an interview, and then she requested him to take care of the king. All this time no member of the royal family had suggested that a priest should be sent for; but {128}for the gratification of public-opinion Walpole recommended it, though he was little better than a heathen, joked about bishops, and laughed at High Church and Low. He addressed himself to the Princess Amelia on the subject thus: "It will be quite as well that the farce should be played. The Archbishop of Canterbury will perform it decently; and the princess might bid him be as short as she liked. It would do the queen neither harm nor good; and it would satisfy all the fools who called them atheists if they affected to be as great fools as they who called them so." So Archbishop Potter was summoned, and attended the dying queen, morning and evening, but the sacrament was not administered. It was supposed that this ceremony could not be performed because of her majesty's irreconcilable hatred of her eldest son, but this could not be known positively, because all her interviews with the archbishop were private. However, everybody felt great curiosity to know whether the solemn rite had been administered, but when at his last visit the courtiers met the priest and asked eagerly, "My lord, has the queen received?" The only reply they got was, "Gentlemen, her majesty is in a most heavenly frame of mind." What that signified they were left to guess, and we may do the same. Meanwhile the king passed his time praising the virtues of his wife, which he recounted over and over again, yet whenever he entered her room he was sure to say something rough or unkind. Once when her eyes had a vacant look peculiar to invalids, he requested her to "stop staring in that disagreeable way, which made her look just like a calf with its throat cut." On the morning of the twentieth the queen turned to her physician, and asked, "How long can this last?" "It will not be long," was the reply, "before your majesty will {129}be relieved from this suffering." "The sooner the better," said the queen. Then she began a solemn, earnest, eloquent prayer, that excited the admiration of every one present, for it was so beautiful and so touching. She requested to be raised up in bed, and asked all present to offer up a prayer for her. As she grew weaker she ordered water to be sprinkled over her, so that she might revive and be able to listen to the appeal to Heaven in her behalf. "Louder!" she murmured, while one or the other of her family prayed, "louder, that I may hear." One of the princesses read the Lord's Prayer, in which the dying queen took part; at its conclusion she looked fixedly at those who stood weeping around her, then with a long-drawn, feeble "so--!" expired, as the clock on the chimney-piece struck eleven.