A new year dawned with bright promise on an expectant world. This last year had been so good in one sense that it could hardly be surpassed. What had it not done for the family life! It had given a good and loving wife to a good and loving husband, and a little child, with undreamt-of possibilities in its slumbering eyes and helpless hands. The public horizon was tolerably clear. The Welsh riots had been quelled and other acts of insubordination in the manufacturing districts put down--not without the use of force--but there was room for trust that such mad tumults would not be repeated. Father Matthews was reforming Ireland. There were far-away wars both with China and Afghanistan, certainly, but the wars were far away in more respects than one, distant enough to have their origin in the English protection of the opium trade, and interference--now with a peaceful, timidly conservative race--and again with fiercely jealous and warlike tribes, slurred over and forgotten, and only the successes of the national arms dwelt upon with pride and exultation. Across "the silver streak" of the Channel there were more remarkable events, marked by a curious inconsistency, than the suitable marriage of the Duc de Nemours. Prince Louis Napoleon Buonaparte landed on the French coast with a handful of men prepared to invade the country, and was immediately overpowered and arrested. He was tried and condemned to imprisonment in the fortress of Ham, from which he escaped in due time, having earned for himself during long years the sobriquet of "the madman of Boulogne." The very same year Prince de Joinville, Louis Philippe's sailor son, was commissioned to bring the ashes of Napoleon from St. Helena to France. The coffin was conveyed in the Prince's frigate, _La Belle Poule_, to Cherbourg, whence a steamboat sailed with the solemn freight up the Seine to Paris. The funeral formed a splendid pageant, attended by the royal family, the ministers, and a great concourse of spectators. The dust of _le petit caporal_ was deposited in a magnificent tomb in the Hotel des Invalides, before the eyes of a few survivors of his Old Guard. Spain and Portugal were still the theatres of civil wars--now smouldering, now leaping up with brief fury. In Spain the Queen Regent, Christina, was driven from the kingdom, and had to take refuge in France for a time. In Portugal, in the middle of a political crisis, Maria da Gloria gave birth to a daughter, which died soon after its birth, while for days her own life was despaired of. CHAPTER XI THE FIRST CHRISTENING.--THE SEASON OF 1841. The Queen was able to open Parliament in person at the end of January.