When, two days previously, the news of the approaching end had been made public, astonished grief had swept over the country. It appeared as if some monstrous reversal of the course of nature was about to take place. The vast majority of her subjects had never known a time when Queen Victoria had not been reigning over them. She had become an indissoluble part of their whole scheme of things, and that they were about to lose her appeared a scarcely possible thought. She herself, as she lay blind and silent, seemed to those who watched her to be divested of all thinking--to have glided already, unawares, into oblivion. Yet, perhaps, in the secret chambers of consciousness, she had her thoughts, too. Perhaps her fading mind called up once more the shadows of the past to float before it, and retraced, for the last time, the vanished visions of that long history--passing back and back, through the cloud of years, to older and ever older memories--to the spring woods at Osborne, so full of primroses for Lord Beaconsfield--to Lord Palmerston's queer clothes and high demeanour, and Albert's face under the green lamp, and Albert's first stag at Balmoral, and Albert in his blue and silver uniform, and the Baron coming in through a doorway, and Lord M. dreaming at Windsor with the rooks cawing in the elm-trees, and the Archbishop of Canterbury on his knees in the dawn, and the old King's turkey-cock ejaculations, and Uncle Leopold's soft voice at Claremont, and Lehzen with the globes, and her mother's feathers sweeping down towards her, and a great old repeater-watch of her father's in its tortoise-shell case, and a yellow rug, and some friendly flounces of sprigged muslin, and the trees and the grass at Kensington. BIBLIOGRAPHY AND LIST OF REFERENCES IN THE NOTES, ARRANGED ALPHABETICALLY. Adams. The Education of Henry Adams: an autobiography. 1918. Ashley. The Life and Correspondence of H.J. Temple, Viscount Palmerston. By A.E.M. Ashley. 2 vols. 1879. Bloomfield. Reminiscences of Court and Diplomatic Life. By Georgiana, Lady Bloomfield. 2 vols. 1883. Broughton. Recollections of a Long Life. By Lord Brougton. Edited by Lady Dorchester. 6 vols. 1909-11. Buckle. The life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. By W.F. Monypenny and G.E. Buckle. 6 vols. 1910-20. Bulow. Gabriele von Bulow, 1791-1887. Berlin. 1893. Bunsen. A Memoir of Baron Bunsen. By his widow, Frances, Baroness Bunsen. 2 vols. 1868. Busch. Bismarck: some secret pages of history. By Dr. Moritz Busch. (English translation.) 8 vols. 1898. Childers. The Life and Correspondence of the Rt. Hon. Hugh C.E. Childers. 2 vols. 1901. Clarendon. The Life and Letters of the Fourth Earl of Clarendon. By Sir Herbert Maxwell. 2 vols. 1913. Cornhill Magazine, vol. 75.