The Queen remained at Ardverikie for four weeks, and doubtless would have enjoyed the wilds thoroughly, had it not been for the lowest deep of persistently bad weather, when "it not only rained and blew, but snowed by way of variety." Lord Campbell heard and wrote down these particulars of the royal stay at Ardverikie. "The Queen was greatly delighted with the Highlands in spite of the bad weather, and was accustomed to sally for a walk in the midst of a heavy rain, putting a great hood ever her bonnet, and showing nothing of her features but her eyes. The Prince's invariable return to luncheon about two o'clock, in spite of grouse-shooting and deer-stalking, is explained by his voluntary desire to please the Queen, and by the intense hunger which always assails him at this hour, when he likes, in German fashion, to make his dinner." In a continuance of the most dismally unpropitious weather, the Queen and her children left Ardverikie on the 17th of September, the Prince having preceded her for a night that he might visit Inverness and the Caledonian Canal. The storm continued, almost without intermission, during the whole of the voyage home. CHAPTER VIII. THE FRENCH FUGITIVES--THE PEOPLE'S CHARTER. Long before the autumn of 1847, the mischievous consequences of the railway mania, complicated by the failure of the potato crop, showed itself in great bankruptcies in the large towns all over the country. The new year came with trouble on its wings. The impending storm burst all over Europe, first in France. Louis Philippe's dynasty was overthrown. In pairs or singly, sometimes wandering aside in a little distraction, so as to be lost sight of for days, the numerous brothers and sisters, with the parent pair, reached Dreux and Eu, and thence, with the exception of the Duchesse d'Orleans and her sons, straggled to England. One can guess the feelings of the Queen and Prince Albert when they heard that their late hosts, doubly allied to them by kindred ties, were fugitives, seeking refuge from the hospitality of a foreign nation. And the first confused tidings of the French revolution which reached the Queen and Prince Albert were rendered more trying, by the almost simultaneous announcement of the death of the old Dowager- Duchess of Gotha, to whom all her grandchildren were so much attached.