On the Sunday which dawned on the first day of her Majesty's widowhood, when the news of her bereavement--announced in a similar fashion in many a city cathedral and country church, was conveyed to the people in a great northern city by Dr. Norman MacLeod's praying for the Queen as a widow, a pang of awe and pity smote every hearer; the minister and the congregation wept together. The disastrous tidings had to travel far and wide: to the Princess Royal, the daughter in whom her father had taken such pride, who had so grieved to part from him when she left England a happy young bride, who had been so glad to greet him in his own old home only a few months before; to the sailor son on the other side of the globe; to the delicate little boy so lately sent in search of health, whose natural cry on the sorrowful tale being told to him was, "Take me to mamma." Deprived in one year of both mother and husband, alone where family relations were concerned, save for her children; with her eldest son, the Prince of Wales, a lad of not more than twenty years, the devoted servants of the Queen rallied round her and strove to support and comfort her. In the absence of the Princess Royal and the Princess of Hohenlohe, the Duchess of Sutherland, one of the Queen's oldest friends, herself a widow, was sent for to be with her royal mistress. Lady Augusta Bruce watched day and night by the daughter as she had watched by the mother. The Queen's people did not know how sore was the struggle, how near they were to losing her. Princess Alice wrote years afterwards of that first dreadful night, of the next three terrible days, with a species of horror, and wondered again and again how she and her mother survived that time. The Queen's weakness was so great that her pulse could hardly be felt. "She spoke constantly about God's knowing best, but showed herself broken-hearted," Lady Bloomfield tells us. It was a sensible relief to the country when it was made public that the Queen had slept for some hours. The doctors urgently advised that her Majesty should leave Windsor and go to Osborne, but she shrank unconquerably from thus quitting all that was mortal of the Prince till he had been laid to rest. The old King of the Belgians, her second father, afflicted in her affliction as he had gloried in her happiness, added his earnest entreaty to, the medical men's opinion, in vain, till the plea was brought forward that for her children's sake--that they might be removed from the fever- tainted atmosphere, the painful step ought to be taken. Even then it was mainly by the influence of the Princess Alice that the Queen, who had proved just and reasonable in all her acts, who had been confirmed by him who was gone in habits of self-control and self-denial, who was the best of mothers, gave up the last sad boon which the poorest might claim, and consented to go immediately with her daughters to Osborne.