That summer his daughter Victoria, with her husband (now Crown Prince) and their children, came again, for a long visit, and there were many other guests, and much was done to cheer the Queen; but her first birthday in orphanage was hopelessly sad, and when that of the Prince came round, his last--though she wrote to her uncle, "This is the dearest of days, and one which fills my heart with love and gratitude," she murmured, because her "beloved mama" was not there to wish him joy. Ah, what an acting, unreasoning thing is the human heart! Yet the Queen seems to have had a brief return of happiness--to have been upborne on a sudden tide of youthful joyance, during their autumn stay at Balmoral. She wrote: "Being out a good deal here and seeing new and fine scenery does me good." Of their last great Highland excursion, she said: "Have enjoyed nothing so much, or felt so much cheered by anything since my great sorrow." Because of this intense love of nature--not the holiday, dressed-up nature, of English parks, streams and lakes--but as she appears in all her wildness, ruggedness, raggedness and simple grandeur, in the glorious land of Scott and Burns, the Queen's journal, though a little clouded at the last, by that "great sorrow," is very pleasant, breezy reading. It gives one a breath of heather, and pine and peat-smoke. After coming from Balmoral, and its bracing outdoor avocations and amusements, the Prince-Consort's health seemed to decline again. He suffered from rheumatic pains and sleeplessness, and he began to feel the chill shadows of the valley he was nearing, creeping around him. The last work of his beneficent life was one of peculiar interest to Americans. It was the amicable arrangement, in conjunction with the Queen, of the ugly affair of the _Trent_. That was a trying time for Americans in England, unless they were of the South, southerly. We of the North, in the beginning of our war for the Union, found to our sad surprise that the sympathies of perhaps the majority of the English were on the side of our opponents. These very people had been ever before, so decidedly and ardently anti-slavery in their sentiments--had counseled such stern and valiant measures for the removal of our "national disgrace," that their new attitude amazed us. We could not understand what sort of a moral whirlwind it was that had caught them up, turned them round, borne them off and set them down on the other side of Mason and Dixon's Line. It was strange, but with the exception of a few such clear-headed, steadfast "friends of humanity" as Cobden and Bright, and such heroes as those glorious operatives of Lancashire, all seemed changed. Even the sentiments of prominent. Exeter Hall, anti-slavery philanthropists had suffered a secession change, "into something new and strange," especially after the battle of Bull Run--that fortunate calamity for us, as it proved. Most people here were captivated by the splendid qualities of