Lady Bloomfield gives some charming pictures of the happy home-life at Windsor--of the children, pretty, merry, healthy, and well-bred; tells very pleasant things of the Queen, and of the sweet and noble Duchess of Kent--but gives only now and then, a glimpse of that gracious and graceful presence, Prince Albert. Her Majesty made the life of her maids of honor almost too easy. No long, tiresome waiting on their poor, tired feet--no long hours of reading aloud, such as poor Miss Burney had to endure, in the time of old Queen Charlotte. Lady Bloomfield--then Georgiana Ravensworth--had little to do but to hand the Queen her bouquet at dinner--to ride out with her and sing with her. In the summer of 1843, the Queen and Prince made their first visit to the King and Queen of France, at the Chateau d'Eu, near Treport, on the coast. The King and several of his sons came off in the royal barge to meet their yacht, which they boarded. One account says that Louis Philippe, most unceremonious of monarchs, caught up the little Queen, kissed her on both cheeks, and carried her bodily on to his barge. Two Queens--Marie Amélie of France and her daughter, Louise of Belgium, and two of her daughters-in-law--were at the landing to receive the first Sovereign of England who had ever come to their shores on a friendly, neighborly visit. It was a visit "of unmixed pleasure," says the Queen, and the account of it is very pleasant reading now; but I have not space to reproduce it. One little passage, in reference to the widowed Duchesse d'Orleans, strikes my eye at this moment: "At ten, dear Hélène came to me with little Paris, and stayed till the King and Queen came to fetch us to breakfast." "Little Paris" is the present Bourbon-Orleanist bugbear of the French Republic--a very tame and well-behaved _bête noir_, but distrusted and dreaded all the same. After this French visit, the Queen and Prince went over to see their uncle and aunt, at Brussels, and had a very interesting tour through Belgium. Prince Albert, writing to the Baron soon after, said: "We found uncle and aunt well. ... The children are blooming. Little Charlotte is quite the prettiest child you ever saw." This "little Charlotte" afterwards married Maximilian of Austria, the imperial puppet of Louis Napoleon in Mexico. So Charlotte was for a brief, stormy time an Empress --then came misfortune and madness. She is living yet, in that world of shadows so much sadder than "the valley of the shadow of death." In the spring of this year, the Duke of Sussex died, and at the next prorogation of Parliament I read that the Queen, no longer fearing to wound the susceptibilities of her proud old uncle, said to her husband, "Come up higher!"--and had a chair for him, precisely like her own, on a level with her own. It was on her left. The smaller chair, on her right, belonged to "little Bertie," who was not yet quite ready to occupy it.