The stirring events now described had severely tried the nerves of the Queen. Early in the year she had been rendered anxious by a severe illness of the Prince Leopold, who was at one time so sick that it was supposed he was dying. Then she was still more shocked and alarmed by news of an attempt which had been made by a man, O’Farrell, to assassinate the Duke of Edinburgh (Prince Alfred) on the 12th of March at Clontarf, near Port Jackson, in New South Wales. O’Farrel’s motives were never quite satisfactorily explained, though it was said at the time that he was a Fenian emissary. He was hanged for the crime on the 21st of April, and the Duke, who had been shot in the back, gradually recovered from his wound. The great and unexpected popularity with which a little book from the Queen’s pen--“Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands”--containing a diary of her holiday rambles, was received during the season, gratified her [Illustration: THE QUEEN INSPECTING THE “GALATEA” IN OSBORNE BAY. (_See p._ 319.)] much. It delighted the people, to whom it showed the homely, matronly, sensible business-like qualities which Englishmen value in the women of their race, reflected in the daily life of their Sovereign. It was a book that reproduced the wife and the house-mother rather than the Monarch, and it was written with great tenderness of feeling and artless simplicity of expression. The sketches, too, with which it was illustrated were amazingly popular, and in truth they were really bold and telling. But the little work had no public importance, save that it served to establish between the Queen and her people relations that were not only affectionate, but almost confidential. The extreme High Churchmen, however, were greatly alarmed to find from the Queen’s Journals that she had strong leanings to the Presbyterian Church. This notion was due to the fact that she took great delight in the preaching and spiritual ministrations of the Scottish Chaplains Royal, who were of course Presbyterians, and who officiated at the Court when it was in Aberdeenshire. It was not easy to understand why the High Churchmen should desire to prevent the Queen from following the bent of her own mind and heart in such a matter. It was absurd to argue that her position as Head of the Church of England bound her to Anglican orthodoxy, for she was also Head of the Church of Scotland. Nor did her Coronation Oath, which merely binds the Sovereign to uphold the Protestant faith, restrict her to the services of the Church of England. The fact is, personages belonging to the great family of European Princes have so many relationships and cross-currents of sympathy with kinsfolk of various creeds, that they become instinctively tolerant in religious matters. Still the attacks of the High Churchmen did neither the Queen nor her book any harm. It had merely revealed the fact that she was a Christian woman, personally pious and God-fearing, with a