"I have two very good friends at the Castle--one of the pages, and a little man who lights the fires. The Queen's pages are not little boys in green, but tall and _stout gentlemen_ from forty to fifty years of age. My friend (Mr. Batchelor) was a page in the time of George III, and was then twenty years old; George IV died in his arms, he says, in a room adjoining the one I am painting in. Mr. Batchelor comes into the room whenever there is nobody there, and admires the picture to my heart's content. My other friend, the fire-lighter, is extremely like Peter Powell, only a size larger. He also greatly admires the picture; he confesses he knows nothing about the robes, and can't say whether they are like or not, but he pronounces the Queen's likeness excellent." [Footnote: Leslie's Autobiography.] CHAPTER VI. THE MAIDEN QUEEN. When the great event of the coronation was over the Queen was left to fulfil the heavy demands of business and the concluding gaieties of the season. It comes upon us with a little pathetic shock, to think of one whom we have long known chiefly in the chastened light of the devoted unflagging worker at her high calling, of our lady of sorrows, as a merry girl--girl-like in her fondness, in spite of her noble nature and the serious claims she did not neglect, of a racket of perpetual excitement. We read of her as going everywhere, as the blithest and most indefatigable dancer in her ball-room, dancing out a pair of slippers before the night was over; we hear how reluctant she was to leave town, how eager to return to it. Inevitably the old and dear friends most interested in her welfare were now regarding this critical period in the Queen's career with anxious eyes. In looking back upon it in after life, she has frankly and gravely acknowledged its pitfalls; "a worse school for a young girl, or one more detrimental to all natural feeling and affection, cannot well be imagined, than the position of a queen at eighteen, without experience, and without a husband to guide and support her. This the Queen can state from painful experience, and she thanks God that none of her dear daughters are exposed to such danger."