In the following summer (1837) the Princess came of age, as princesses do, at eighteen, and it was meet that the day should be celebrated with, all honour and gladness. But the rejoicings were damped by the manifestly failing health of the aged King, then seventy-one years of age. He had been attacked by hay fever--to which he had been liable every spring at an earlier period of his life, but the complaint was more formidable in the case of an old and infirm man, while he still struggled manfully to transact business and discharge the duties of his position. At the Levee and Drawing-room of the 21st May he sat while receiving the company. By the 24th he was confined to his rooms, and the Queen did not leave him. At six o'clock in the morning the Union Jack was hoisted on the summit of the old church, Kensington, and on the flagstaff at Palace Green. In the last instance the national ensign was surmounted by a white silk flag on which was inscribed in sky-blue letters "Victoria." The little town adorned itself to the best of its ability. "From the houses of the principal inhabitants of the High Street were also displayed the Royal Standard, Union Jack, and other flags and colours, some of them of extraordinary dimensions." Soon after six o'clock the gates of Kensington Gardens were thrown open for the admission of the public to be present at the serenade which was to be performed at seven o'clock under the Palace windows, with the double purpose of awaking the Princess in the most agreeable manner, and of reminding her that at the same place and hour, eighteen years ago, she had opened her eyes on the May world. The sleep of youth is light as well as sound, and it may well be that the Princess, knowing all that was in store for her on the happy day that could not be too long, the many goodly tokens of her friends' love and gladness--not the least precious those from Germany awaiting her acceptance--the innumerable congratulations to be offered to her, was wide awake before the first violin or voice led the choir. The bells rang out merry peals, carriages dashed by full of fine company. Kensington Square must have thought it was the old days of William and Mary, and Anne, or of George II and Queen Caroline at the latest, come back again. The last French dwellers in Edwardes Square must have talked volubly of what their predecessors had told them of Paris before the flood, Paris before the Orleanists, and the Bonapartists, and the Republic--Paris when the high-walled, green-gardened hotels of the Faubourg St. Germain were full of their ancient occupants; when Marie Antoinette was the daughter of the Caesars at the Tuileries, and the _bergere_ Queen at le Petit Trianon. Before the sun went down many a bumper was drunk in honour of Kensington's own Princess, who should that day leave her girlhood all too soon behind her.