"Many things unite in rendering the Queen's remaining years terribly hard and desolate. Her lameness does not improve much. She can walk very little indeed (and that is great labour) out of doors, and never without two sticks indoors, and is carried, which the newspaper reporters with singular ignorance consider a proof of her great 'delicacy of health,' complaining also of the public _not_ being admitted everywhere, as if it would be pleasant for any lady to be carried in and out of a carriage before crowds of people! But the people are very kind and anxious, though very unreasoning in thinking a sprain can be cured in a few days, especially when she is no longer young." In the autumn of 1881 the Queen held a review in the Queen's Park, Edinburgh, of the Scottish Volunteers, considerably over 40,000 of whom passed before her. The march past occupied more than three hours, during which the rain descended in torrents. The Queen was in an open carriage, and however much they might have been disappointed, none of her volunteers would have murmured had Her Majesty withdrawn at an early stage of the review. But, true soldier's daughter as she was, she paid no heed to the weather, thinking only of her duty to let herself be seen by those who had come from all parts of the country in the hope of seeing and being seen by their Queen. She did not leave the Park until the last man had passed. By this time the carriage was full of water, and pools of it, I have been told, dropped from the dresses of herself and ladies when they returned to Holyrood. In a like determination never, if she could, to cause disappointment to her people, when she visited Liverpool about four years later, the Queen drove slowly through more than three miles of streets under a drenching rain which lasted throughout the whole route. The open-air drives in the Highlands had, no doubt, accustomed Her Majesty to bear exposure so trying without injury to her health. The stimulus, too, given by the heartiness of the greeting, which her courage and gracious courtesy evoked, may have helped to keep all evil consequences at bay. In writing to me, May 17, 1886, the drenching rain was not mentioned. "The Liverpool visit," she only said, "was a perfectly triumphal ovation, so warm and hearty ... from a million and a half of people. The feeling against Home Rule is on the increase."