The same pleasant passage was made by the canal back to Patricroft, where the railway carriages were entered and the train steamed to Stockport. Crewe, Stafford--there another old soldier, Lord Anglesey, was waiting--Rugby, Weedon, Wolverton, and Watford, then at five o'clock the railway journey ended. The royal carriages were in attendance, and rest and home were near at hand. The day had been hot and fatiguing, but the evening was soft and beautiful with moonlight; a final change of horses at Uxbridge, the carriage shut when the growing darkness prevented any farther necessity for seeing and being seen; at half-past seven, Windsor, and the three little children still up and at the door "well and pleased." From Windsor the Court went for some days to London for the closing of the Exhibition. The number of visitors had been six millions two hundred thousand, and the total receipts five hundred thousand pounds. There had not been a single accident, "We ought, indeed, to be thankful to God for such a success," the Prince wrote reverently. On the 14th of October the Queen paid a farewell visit to the place in which she had been so much interested, with the regret natural on such an occasion. "It looked so beautiful," she wrote in her journal, "that I could not believe it was the last time I was to see it." But already the dismantling had begun. The Queen refers in the next breath to a heroine of the Exhibition, an old Cornish woman named Mary Kerlynack, who had found the spirit to walk several hundreds of miles to behold the wonder of her generation. This day she was at one of the doors to see another sight, the Queen. "A most hale old woman" her Majesty thought Mary, "who was near crying at my looking at her." On the 15th, a cheerlessly wet day, in keeping with a somewhat melancholy scene, Prince Albert and his fellow commissioners closed the Exhibition--a ceremony at which it was not judged desirable the Queen should be present, though she grieved not to witness the end as well as the beginning. "How sad and strange to think this great and bright time has passed away like a dream," her Majesty wrote once more in her diary. The day of the closing of the Exhibition happened to be the twelfth anniversary of the Queen's betrothal to the Prince. The tidings arrived in the course of November of the death, in his eighty-first year, in the old palace of Herrenhausen, on the 18th of the month, of the King of Hanover, the fifth, and last surviving son of George III and Queen Charlotte. He had been more popular as a king than as a prince. The arrival of Kossuth in England in the autumn of 1851 had brought a disturbing element into international politics. But it was left for Louis Napoleon's _coup d'état_ in Paris on the 2nd of December, when the blood shed so mercilessly on the Boulevards was still fresh in men's minds, to get Lord Palmerston into a dilemma, from which there was no disentanglement but the loss of office on his part.