"The dear Prince of Wales, though quite himself, bears great traces of his fearful 'death-illness.' He seems like new-born, pleased at every tree and flower, ... and gazing on them with a sort of 'Wehmuth' which is quite touching...." Fortunately for the recovery of the Prince of Wales, the treatment of typhus was now better understood than it had been but a few years before. "Ah!" the Queen said to me soon after this time, "had _my_ Prince had the same treatment as the Prince of Wales, he might not have died!"--one of those sad, vain imaginings of "what might have been," common to us all, but on which the Queen was too wise to allow her mind to dwell. The Queen had long ceased to have reason to complain of want of appreciation on the part of the people. On the contrary, it was enthusiastically shown whenever she was seen in public, and most impressively when she went in January 1872 to the thanksgiving service in St Paul's for the recovery of the Prince of Wales. Her letters are full of expressions of satisfaction at these demonstrations of public feeling. Thus she writes, for example, to me on the 10th of April 1872: "There never was a greater success or a greater exhibition of spontaneous loyalty than the Queen's visit to the East End the other day;" and a few days later (23rd April) she calls my attention to a similar display "at two very pretty military events which took place at Parkhurst last Thursday, and here [Osborne] yesterday, on the occasion of giving new colours to the 79th Cameron Highlanders," and of her acceptance from them of the old colours. "Their former chaplain," she adds, with her usual love of detail, "who has been fourteen years with them, and in Lucknow, came on purpose to bless the colours, which he did extremely well and touchingly. It is a splendid regiment." The great change in the public mind, which resulted in the fall of Mr Gladstone's Ministry at the beginning of 1874, took the Queen somewhat by surprise. "The result of the elections," she writes to me (10th February 1874), "is astounding. What an important turn the elections have taken! It shows that the country is not _Radical_. What a triumph, too, Mr Disraeli has obtained, and what a good sign this large Conservative majority is of the state of the country, which really required (as formerly) a strong Conservative party!" Amid the turmoil of the elections which led to this important result a domestic incident took place--the Confirmation of the Princess Beatrice, which was communicated to me in the following letter (January 13, 1874):--