who seeks to reconcile herself to accept a birthday gift in the form of a cheque, “will then all be your present.”[247] In another letter she endeavours to reassure the Queen as to her embarrassments by speaking brightly and cheerily of them. “I have made all the summer walking-out dresses,” she writes--“seven in number, with paletôts for the girls--not embroidered, but entirely made from beginning to end: likewise the new necessary flannel shawls for the expected. I manage all the nursery accounts, and everything myself, which gives me plenty to do, as everything increases, and on account of the house, we must live very economically for these next years.” The Princess, as will be seen, was looking for an early addition to her family, and the Queen felt that her health was imperilled by the fresh anxiety and the increasing household drudgery which her straitened circumstances added to the burden of her social and public duties. Her Majesty, therefore, with characteristic generosity, herself made arrangements for her daughter’s _accouchement_, which relieved her of some of her worry. “It is so kind of you,” writes the Princess, gratefully, to the Queen, “to give Dr. Priestly his fee, otherwise I would have scruples in giving so large a sum for my own comfort.” How welcome her mother’s assistance was to the Princess may be gathered from another passage in one of her letters to the Queen, in which she says, “The man who built our house has nearly been made bankrupt, and wants money from us to save him from ruin, and we can scarcely manage it.”[248] Again the same sad subject crops up some nine months after the birth of her daughter, which took place during the Austro-Prussian War. The accumulated anxieties of that dreadful time had told on the health of the Princess. The Queen had taken charge of the little ones in the Darmstadt household, and thus freed the Princess from much care. Hence in autumn we find her rejoicing that the slight change to Nierstein, Gelbes Haus, has done her good, and adding, “If later, through your [the Queen’s] kindness, a little journey should be possible to us, it would be very beneficial to us.” But in a few days she soon fell ill again, and on the 29th of August she writes to the Queen saying, “Mountain air Weber wants me to have, and quite away from all bother; but I fear that is impossible _now_, on account of Louis not being able to leave--and, then, financially. I have some _heimweh_ [home-sickness] after dear old England, Balmoral, and all at home, I own, though the joy of being near dear Louis again is so great. But life is meant for work and not for pleasure, and I learn more and more to be grateful and content with that which the Almighty sends me, and to find the sunshine in spite of the clouds.” Nor was the Queen’s generosity limited to her daughter. She treated the Prince Louis at this time with great tenderness and sympathy. In one letter from the Princess to the