The Queen has white cottages not far from the castle gate, built on the model of the Osborne cottages, pretty and convenient homes of keepers, keepers' widows, &c., &c., with the few artisans whose services are necessary for the small population. There are other cottages of the old, homely sort, containing no more than "the butt and the benn" of stereotyped Scotch architecture, with the fire made of "peats" or of sticks on the hearth-floor. In some of these, the walls of the better rooms are covered with good plates and photographs of every member of the royal family, with whose lineaments we are familiar, from the widowed Queen to the last royal couple among her grandchildren. These likenesses are much-valued gifts from the originals. As a nucleus to the cottages, there is _the_ shop or Highland store with a wide door and a couple of counters representing two branches of trade in the ordinarily distinct departments of groceries and haberdashery. Probably this is the one shop in her Majesty's domains in which, as we have evidence in her journal, [Footnote: "Life in the Highlands"--Queen's journal. "Albert went out with Alfred for the day, and I walked out with the two girls and Lady Churchill, stopped at the shop and made some purchases for poor people and others. Drove a little way, got out and walked up the hill to _Balnacroft_, Mrs. P. Farquharson's, and she walked round with us to some of the cottages to show me where the poor people lived, and to tell them who I was.... I went into a small cabin of old Kitty Kear's, who is eighty-six years old, quite erect, and who welcomed us with a great air of dignity. She sat down and spun. I gave her, also, a warm petticoat; she said, 'May the Lord ever attend ye and yours, here and hereafter, and may the Lord be a guide to ye and keep ye from all harm.' ... We went into three other cottages--to Mrs. Symons's (daughter-in-law to the old widow living next door) who had an 'unwell boy,' then across a little burn to another old woman's, and afterwards peeped into Blair's, the fiddler. We drove back and got out again to visit old Mrs. Grant (Grant's mother), who is so tidy and clean, and to whom I gave a dress and a handkerchief; and she said, 'You're too kind to me, you're over kind to me, ye give me more every year, and I get older every year.' After talking some time to her, she said, 'I am happy to see ye looking so nice.' She had tears in her eyes, and speaking of Vicky's going said, 'I'm very sorry, and I think she is sorry hersel'.'..."] she avails herself of the feminine privilege of shopping. For the Queen can live the life of a private lady--can show herself the most considerate and sympathetic of noble gentlewomen in this primitive locality. She can walk or drive her ponies, or visit on foot her commissioner or her minister, or look in at her school, or call on her sick, aged, and poor, and take to them the comforts she has provided for them, the tokens of her remembrance they prize so much.