Other than political anxieties made the spring of 1861 dismal to the Queen. On the 12th of March she had visited her mother, the Duchess of Kent, at Frogmore, and found her suffering great pain from the effects of a surgical operation which had been performed to relieve an abscess in her arm. On the 15th Her Majesty and her husband were inspecting the Horticultural Society’s gardens at South Kensington, when they were summoned by Sir James Clark to the bedside of the Duchess of Kent, who began to develop feverish symptoms. When they arrived they found her dying. “I knelt before her,” writes the Queen, “kissed her dear hand and placed it next my cheek; but though she opened her eyes, she did not, I think, know me.... I went out to sob,” adds Her Majesty, stricken to the heart at finding, for the first time in her life, her mother had not received her with a loving smile of recognition. All through the night the Queen watched by the bedside of the dying Princess, weeping as she thought of her childhood and its sacred memories, and of the dreadful blank her mother’s death must make in her life. At eight in the morning of the next day (the 16th) Prince Albert persuaded the Queen to leave her mother’s room for a little, and rest. But she could not rest. She insisted on returning to the sick-room, and when she went back she saw that her mother was passing away. The heart-beats grew fainter; the eyes slowly closed, and as the clock struck half-past nine, Prince Albert took the Queen out of the room, and she knew all was over. For forty-one years she had not been parted from her mother save for a few brief weeks at a time. Now they were parted for ever on this side of the grave. “I seemed,” she writes, “to have lived through a life, to have become old.” The death of the Duchess of Kent plunged the Royal household in grief. She died leaving not one dry eye behind her among those who had known and served and loved her. The Princess Frederick William of Prussia hurried to her mother’s side, arriving at Windsor on the 18th; and then from every quarter, letters and messages of condolence came pouring in. Addresses of sympathy were carried in both Houses of Parliament, and every effort was made by Ministers to lighten the anxieties of the Queen at a time when sorrow lay heavily on her heart. The funeral took place on the 25th, in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, where the body was laid till a mausoleum at Frogmore could be built. “I and my girls,” wrote the Queen to King Leopold on that day, “prayed at home together, and dwelt on her happiness and peace.” On the 2nd of April the Princess Frederick William returned to Berlin, and the Queen and her husband retired to Osborne. The Easter recess had produced a lull in politics, and it might have been expected that the Queen would have been permitted to mourn her bereavement in peace. It was not so. On the 12th of April she was deeply pained to find the _Times_ renewing its old attacks on Prince Albert,