year leading my pony, and advanced step by step by his good conduct and intelligence. His attentive care and faithfulness cannot be exceeded, and the state of my health, which of late years has been sorely tried and weakened, renders such qualifications most valuable, and, indeed, most needful upon all occasions. He has since most deservedly been promoted to be an upper servant and my permanent personal attendant (December, 1865). He has all the independence and elevated feelings peculiar to the Highland race, and is singularly straightforward, simple-minded, kind-hearted, and disinterested, always ready to oblige, and of a discretion rarely to be met with.” By all accounts Brown seems to have been an honest brusque sort of man, whose fidelity to his master and mistress won their entire confidence. Extraordinary stories were told in Society of his influence over the Queen, and of the almost despotic authority which he wielded over the Royal Family. Even the highest officers of the Royal Household had to speak him fairly, otherwise trouble came to them. He attended the Queen in all her walks and drives, and had the privilege of speaking to her with the rough candour in which he habitually indulged, on any subject he chose to talk about. He had often been engaged in services of a delicate nature for the Royal Family, and it was said that nothing could be said or done, no matter how secretly, at or about the Court, without his immediately knowing of it. Löhlein, the Prince Consort’s old valet, was the only person in the Household whom Brown never dared to meddle with. Through the _Court Circular_ the Queen bewailed the “grievous shock” she felt at the “irreparable loss” of “an honest, faithful, and devoted follower, a trustworthy, discreet, and straightforward man,” whose fidelity “had secured for himself the real friendship of the Queen.” This grief was not only natural but eminently creditable to her. Brown had for years been the guardian of her life, and in the case of Connor’s attack he had defended her with the grim courage of his race. But for him her Majesty could not have enjoyed that freedom of movement out of doors which had been of [Illustration: JOHN BROWN. (_From a Photograph by G. W. Wilson and Co., Aberdeen._)]