The Queen had been grieved this summer by hearing of the serious illness of her greatest friend, the Queen of the Belgians, who was suffering from the same dangerous disease of which her sister, Princess Marie, had died. Probably it was with the hope of cheering King Leopold, and of perhaps getting a glimpse of the much-loved invalid, that the Queen, after proroguing Parliament in person, sailed on the 21st of August with the Prince and their four elder children in the royal yacht on a short trip to Ostend, where the party spent a day. King Leopold met the visitors--the younger of whom were much interested by their first experience of a foreign town. The Queen had the satisfaction of finding her uncle well and pleased to see her, so that she could call the meeting afterwards a "delightful, happy dream;" but there was a sorrowful element in the happiness, occasioned by the absence of Queen Louise, whose strength was not sufficient for the journey to Ostend, and of whose case Sir James Clark, sent by the Queen to Laeken, thought badly. The poor Orleans family had another blow in store for them. On Prince Albert's thirty-first birthday, the 26th of August, which he passed at Osborne, news arrived of the death that morning, at Claremont, of Louis Philippe, late King of the French, in his seventy-seventh year. The Queen and the Prince had been prepared to start with their elder children for Scotland the day after they heard of the death, and by setting out at six o'clock in the morning they were enabled to pay a passing visit to the house of mourning. We may be permitted to remark here, by what quiet, unconscious touches in letters and journals we have brought home to us the dual life, full of duty and kindliness, led by the highest couple in the land. Whether it is in going with a family of cousins to take the last look at a departed kinsman, or in getting up at daybreak to express personal sympathy with another family in sorrow, we cannot fail to see, while it is all so simply said and done, that no painful ordeal is shirked, no excuse is made of weighty tasks and engrossing occupations, to free either Queen or Prince from the gentle courtesies and tender charities of everyday humanity; we recognise that the noblest and busiest are also the bravest, the most faithful, the most full of pity. CHAPTER XVI. THE QUEEN'S FIRST STAY AT HOLYROOD--LIFE IN THE HIGHLANDS--THE DEATH OF THE QUEEN OF THE BELGIANS.