The Queen and Prince Albert returned to Windsor on the evening of Saturday, the 18th of January, and on the afternoon of Monday, the 20th, they started again to pay a long-projected visit to her old friend the Duke of Wellington at Strathfieldsaye. It was known that the Duke had set his heart on entertaining his sovereign in his own house, and she not only granted him the boon, but in consideration of his age, his laurels, and the long and intimate connection between them, she let the visit have more of a private and friendly character than the visits of sovereigns to subjects were wont to have. However, the country did not lose its gala. Arches of winter evergreens instead of summer flowers, festive banners, loyal inscriptions, yeoman corps, holiday faces, met her on all sides. At Swallowfield--a name which Mary Russell Mitford has made pleasant to English ears--"no less a person than the Speaker of the House of Commons," the representative of an old Huguenot refugee, the Right Honourable John Shaw Lefevre, commanded the troop of yeomanry. The Iron Duke met his honoured guests in the hall and conducted them to the library. Every day the same formula was gone through. "The Duke takes the Queen in to dinner, sits by her Majesty, and after dinner gets up and says, 'With your Majesty's permission I give the health of her Majesty,' and then the same to the Prince. They then adjourn to the library, and the Duke sits on the sofa by the Queen (almost as a father would sit by a daughter) for the rest of the evening until eleven o'clock, the Prince and the gentlemen being scattered about in the library or the billiard-room, which opens into it. In a large conservatory beyond, the band of the Duke's grenadier regiment plays through the evening." There was much that was unique and kindly in the relations between the Queen and the greatest soldier of his day. He had stood by her baptismal font; she had been his guest, when she was the girl- Princess, at Walmer. He had sat in her first Council; he had witnessed her marriage; she was to give his name to one of her sons; in fact, he had taken part in every event of her life. The present arrangements were a graceful, well-nigh filial, tribute of affectionate regard for the old man who had served his country both on the battle-field and in the senate, who had watched his Queen's career with the keenest interest, and rejoiced in her success as something with which he had to do. The old soldier also gave the Prince shooting, but it was the "fine wild sport" which might have been expected from the host, and which seemed more to the taste of the guest. And in the party of gentlemen who walked for miles over the ploughed land and through the brushwood, none kept up the pace better than the veteran.