The Queen is gone! It will take us a long while to believe it. The solemn and majestic death-march--the rolling of muffled drums--the tolling of funeral bells do not help us to realize it any the more plainly. We read the news, we shed tears,--we think of it and we ponder it, but we do not really yet understand the full weight of the blow that has fallen upon the English Empire in the death of the Queen at this particular juncture in history. We shall realize it by-and-bye; but not yet--not yet for a long while! We cannot believe but that she is still with us; and the black pageant of death, we think, must be a mere bad dream which will pass presently with the full light of morning. It is not for me to play biographer; there are hundreds of brilliant men and women in the land ready to write full and detailed memoirs of the Queen, and to chronicle her virtues, her good deeds, her never-failing sympathy with the suffering and the poor. I am merely trying to express in this brief tribute to her imperishable glory what I feel to be the special lesson of this noblest Woman’s life to women. In a time like the present, when the accumulation of wealth seems to be the chief object of existence, and the indulgence of self the rule of daily conduct, and yet, when despite our exceptional advantages, our modern luxuries and conveniences, so many of us are weary, restless and ill at ease, travelling from one place to another in search of some chimera of happiness which for ever eludes our grasp, is it not plain and paramount, after all, that simple goodness is best? The “old-fashioned” virtues,--is there not something in them?--something sweet and penetrating like the perfume of thyme and lavender in the “old-fashioned” garden? One recalls to-day the words of the great Napoleon to a lady who, deploring lack of energy and enthusiasm in France, said to him-- “Sire, we want _men_.” “No, Madame,” was the curt rejoinder,--“we want mothers!” This is what every great nation needs--mothers,--true good women, content with their husbands and their homes--women whose dearest joy in life is so to influence their sons that they may grow up to be useful, clever, brave and honourable men. This invaluable influence of pure and modest womanhood is what England is fast losing. For many of her matrons, especially those of the upper classes, are no longer content to be matronly,--they must have the pleasures, the dissipations, the frivolous gaieties of the extremely young, and the girl of to-day is often brought into reluctant rivalry with her own mother in the contest for the unmeaning flatteries and attentions of men. Our late Monarch has given to women a supreme example of what mothers should be,--wise, prudent, patient, never weary in well-doing, and for ever tender, for ever loving. How sweet it is to-day to remember the little endearing words which she wrote when he who is now our King was a newborn infant in her arms:--