The Volunteer movement has proved no mere flash in the pan, caused by a sudden explosion of passing irritation. It has grown and strengthened, and now, after twenty-six years of existence, it adds more than 200,000 men to the internal defences of the country. The annual meeting of the National Rifle Association has furnished proof to the world that the Volunteer force contains a body of skilled marksmen, who, under able generalship, might turn the scale in many a battle. CHAPTER XV. THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH. The year 1861 closed the book of the happy wedded life of the Queen. The hand of death lay heavy upon her, and took from her first her mother, and then her husband. The death of her mother was her first very great sorrow. Her half-brother, Prince Charles of Leiningen, had died in 1856; but his life and hers, during his latter years, had lain very much apart, and though she mourned him deeply and truly, he had not made part of her life, and his death could not be to her what the death of her mother was, who had watched over her from childhood, and with whom she passed part of almost every day; still less could it bring the loneliness and desolation in which the Queen was left by the death of her husband, “her dearest life in life,” as she had called him. The Duchess of Kent died in March, 1861. There is no consolation in being told that such a loss is common. It is not common to the heart that has to bear it. The Queen felt, as all must feel when death takes from them a beloved parent, that part of her life was gone which nothing could restore. She wrote in the diary so often quoted:-- “How awful! How mysterious! But what a blessed end! Her gentle spirit at rest, her sufferings over! But I--I, wretched child--who had lost the mother I so tenderly loved, from whom for these forty-one years I had never been parted except for a few weeks, what was my case? My childhood--everything seemed to crowd upon me at once. I seemed to have lived through a life, to have become old! What I had dreaded and fought off the idea of for years, had come, and must be borne. The blessed future meeting, and _her_ peace and rest, must henceforward be my comfort.”