The Prince also during the Queen's illness, conferred with her ministers, and transacted all necessary business for her. There were nine of these natural illnesses. I commend the example of the Prince-Consort to the husbands of America, to husbands all over the world. It was a glad and grateful Christmas which they spent in Windsor that year--the first after their marriage,--the first since their union, so pompously and piously blessed by priests and people, had been visibly blessed by Heaven. The next month the Queen opened Parliament in person, and gave the Lords and gentlemen another elocutionary treat in her admirable reading of her speech,--that "most excellent thing in woman," a sweet voice, telling even on the Tories. Prince Albert was with her, of course, and she looked even prouder and happier than usual. She had found yet new honors for herself and for him,--the most noble and ancient orders of Maternity and Paternity,--exceeding old, and yet always new. That day the young Prince may have felt glowing in his heart a sweet prescience of the peculiar comfort and joy he afterwards found in the loving devotion and noble character of his firstborn, that little blessing that _would_ come, though "only a girl." That day the Queen wore in her diadem a new jewel, a "pearl of great price,"--a pure little human soul. That faithful stand-by, King Leopold, came over to stand as chief sponsor at the christening of the Princess Royal,--which took place at Buckingham Palace, on the anniversary of her mother's marriage. The little girl, who received the names of Victoria Adelaide Mary Louisa, is said by her father to have behaved "with great propriety and like a Christian." So ended the first year of Queen Victoria's married life. To say it had been a happy year would seem, after the records we have, to put a very inadequate estimate on its degree of harmony and content--and yet it were much to say of any marriage, during the trying period in which many of the tastes and habits of two separate lives must be harmonized, and some heroically abandoned. It is a period of readjustment and sacrifice. Redundant and interfering growths of character must be pruned away, and yet if the lopping process is carried too far, character itself must suffer, the juices of its life and power, individuality and will, are wasted. The Queen always contended that it was the Prince who made all the sacrifices--unselfishly adjusting his life and character to suit hers, and her position--yet not long after her marriage she records the fact that she was beginning to sympathize with him in his peculiar tastes, particularly in his love for a quiet country life. She says: "I told Albert that formerly I was too happy to go to London, and wretched to leave it; and now since the blessed hour of my marriage, and still more since the summer, I dislike and am unhappy to leave the country, and could be content and happy never to go to town. This pleased him."