the day.” The doctors, it seems, felt uneasy towards the evening, when they discovered that the Prince had begun to breathe with more difficulty. The Queen read to him during the greater part of the day, and he manifested great reluctance to let her leave him, even when her duty called her away for a few minutes. On the 12th the bad symptoms increased, and Palmerston wrote three letters, in quick succession, to Sir C. Phipps, each more distracted than the other. On the 13th Dr. Jenner had to warn the Queen that congestion of the lungs might set in, and she herself saw that her husband had become much weaker. But all through the night comforting reports were brought to her, and next morning, the 14th, Mr. Brown, the Royal apothecary, told her that Prince Albert was over the crisis. She went straight to his bedside. “I went in,” she writes, “and never can I forget how beautiful my darling looked, lying there with his face lit up by the rising sun, his eyes unusually bright, gazing as it were at unseen objects, and not taking notice of me.”[109] Hour after hour, as she watched by the sick bed, the Queen saw that her husband was slowly sinking. Still, in the afternoon he knew her--for as he laid his weary head on her shoulder, he kissed her and muttered, “_Gutes frauchen_.” Then his mind would wander, and then he would doze in brief and troubled snatches of sleep. He took his children by the hand when they came and kissed him, but it is doubtful if he now knew them. Late in the afternoon he asked for Sir Charles Phipps, who came and kissed his hand, whereupon he again closed his eyes. So he lingered on, the Queen keeping her mournful watch with breaking heart. At a late hour they changed his bed, and on the Queen pointing to a favourable sign, Dr. Jenner told her that the Prince’s breathing rendered all favourable signs of no avail. At last she went to her room, but returned when she heard the breathing grow worse. The Prince was partially conscious, for when she kissed him and whispered, “_Es ist kleines Frauchen_”--“’Tis your own little wife”--he kissed her also. But he seemed desirous of being left quite undisturbed, and so she retired to her room to weep. The end was coming fast. Clark soon saw that a serious change for the worse was setting in, and the Princess Alice went to summon the Queen. When she came she found the Prince still breathing, and she knelt at the bedside, taking his cold hand in hers. On the opposite side knelt the Princess Alice--at the foot of the bed the Prince of Wales and the Princess Helena. The doctors, Generals Bruce and Grey, Sir Charles Phipps, the Dean of Windsor, Prince Ernest of Leiningen, and the faithful valet, Löhlein, stood around hushed and grief-stricken, and the sobs of those to whom the Prince was dearest alone broke the stillness of the chamber of death. The dying man’s face grew serenely soft and reposeful, as his breathing became feebler and feebler. At last he strove hard to take a long, deep breath.