vital consequence to her health and strength. Old servants, when possessed of Brown’s sterling qualities of manhood, in process of time gradually pass into the category of old friends. Their lives become intertwined in many ways with the life of the family to which they are attached. Their death leaves behind it in the hearts of their masters and mistresses the sting of a personal bereavement. This was, in a special sense, the case with the Queen, whose fate it has been to see the circle of old familiar faces round her contracting every year. Her expressions of sorrow over Brown’s grave, though they provoked rude criticism, merely gave expression to a sentiment of melancholy which was the natural outgrowth of her life of “lonely splendour.”[188] From the 18th of April to the 8th of May the Court was at Osborne, and the state of the Queen’s health was such as to cause her medical advisers some concern. The dynamite scare, a slight accident that had happened to her through slipping on the stairs at Windsor Castle, the deaths of her friend Mrs. Stonor[189] and her attendant, Brown--all contributed to produce an attack of nervous debility that could only be remedied by repose. In the third week of April the Queen created quite a panic among the sheep farmers and the fashionable purveyors of the large towns. She had read many gloomy articles in the papers, lamenting the decrease in the number of English sheep. Instead of anticipating, by a few days, the appearance of Easter lamb at the Royal table, as did Napoleon I. on one occasion, her Majesty notified that no lamb would be consumed in her Household. The effect of the notice was magical. The price of lamb went down in a few hours to 4d. a pound, and farmers, who had at enormous expense bred and fed large stocks of lamb for the Easter market, saw bankruptcy staring them in the face. The economic fallacy was obvious. The Queen forgot that the slaughter of lambs which were bred for the butcher, and which but for the Easter market would not be bred at all, was not the cause of the scarcity of sheep. In a few weeks the notice was withdrawn.