On the 14th of March her Majesty left Windsor for Portsmouth, accompanied by the Princess Beatrice. From thence she sailed to Cherbourg, and proceeded to Mentone, where she arrived on the 17th. The Chalêt des Rosiers, where the Queen lived, was a newly-built villa, standing on a small artificial plateau, fifty yards from the railway, and a hundred from the shore, about half-a-mile from the old town, and three-quarters of a mile from the ravine and bridge of St. Louis which divide Italy from France. Precipices, rugged steeps, abysmal ravines, and rocky beds of old torrents rise from behind the villa in wild confusion. Five miles away, mountains whose bases are traversed by terraces covered with orange groves, soar grandly into the sky. Her Majesty was soon joined by Prince Leopold, the King and Queen of Saxony, and Lord Lyons, and she made daily excursions in the neighbourhood. On the 21st of March there was a great _fête_, with splendid illuminations held in her honour, and she witnessed the scene from the balcony of her villa. Before leaving, on the 14th of April, the Queen thanked the authorities and the residents for contributing so cordially to the pleasure of her visit. As a memento of it, she presented the chief of the municipal band, who had composed a cantata in her honour, with a diamond breast-pin. The marriage of the Duke of Albany was now approaching, and it was with deep regret that the Queen found it necessary to leave him at Mentone, as he had not recovered from the effects of an accident he had met with. The grant of £25,000 a year for his Royal Highness had been moved by Mr. Gladstone in the House of Commons on the 23rd of March, and carried by a vote of 387 to 42. Mr. Labouchere, however, opposed the vote, because he said the savings from the Civil List ought to be returned to the State by the Queen before any Royal grants were voted by Parliament. Mr. Broadhurst also thought that £25,000[181] a year was too much to vote for such a purpose in a country where the majority lived on weekly wages. Mr. Storey opposed voting public money save for public services, and described the House of Commons as “a large syndicate interested in expenditure.” But there was no new point raised in the debate, save Mr. Labouchere’s argument, based on the fact that George III., who had £1,000,000 a year of Civil List, maintained his own children. Mr. Gladstone, of course, challenged the precedent, by pointing out that Parliament had not entered into an implied contract with George III. to provide for his children. But for the first time he admitted that savings were hoarded up out of the Civil List. Only, he said, they were not large enough to provide for the maintenance of the Queen’s children, and he assured the House that after he had come to know the amount of them, his conclusion was that they were not more than were called for by the contingencies which might occur in such a family. As has been stated before, the Royal savings represent