Great attention was given to exactitude with regard to money in the Queen’s early training. There are many stories of the little Princess visiting shops and relinquishing some desired purchase because she had not money enough to pay for it. One of these anecdotes is preserved at Tunbridge Wells, and tells how the Princess Victoria, not having money enough to buy some greatly desired toy, so far went beyond her accustomed self-control as to ask the shopkeeper to reserve it for her till she had received a fresh instalment of her allowance for pocket-money, and that the child came on her donkey as early as seven o’clock in the morning to claim possession of the object she had set her heart on, the very instant she had the money to pay for it. Perhaps these lessons had their source from the frugal German Court of Coburg; but whatever their origin, they have stood the Queen in good stead, and have enabled her to set a perpetual good example to her subjects of the blessedness of obedience to the injunction, “owe no man anything.” It must not be forgotten, too, that she was not, throughout her girlhood, without an object lesson in the disagreeable consequences of extravagance. Her father had died in debt, and unless his creditors differed from the race of creditors in general, they did not fail during the seventeen years which elapsed between the Duke’s death and his daughter’s accession to remind his widow of the fact. One of the first acts of the young Queen on ascending the throne was to pay her father’s debts, contracted before she was born. The scrupulousness with regard to money which was enjoined on her as a child has been one of the Queen’s many claims to the loyalty of her people. Miss Martineau, in her “Thirty Years’ Peace” (written about 1845), speaking of this aspect of Her Majesty’s education and character, has said, “Such things are no trifles. The energy and conscientiousness brought out by such training are blessings to a whole people; and a multitude of her more elderly subjects, to this day, feel a sort of delighted surprise as every year goes by without any irritation on any hand about regal extravagance--without any whispered stories of loans to the Sovereign--without any mournful tales of ruined tradesmen and exasperated creditors.” A trifling circumstance may here be mentioned illustrative of the Queen’s economy in personal expenditure. A Paris dressmaker, of world-wide fame, recently (1893) brought an action against a rival who was trading under the same name. In the course of evidence given at the trial the celebrated _modiste_ stated that he had made dresses for every Royal lady in Europe except Her Majesty the Queen of England. Indeed, every one who has seen the Queen, either in public or private, will agree that she is not indebted either to the dressmaker or milliner for the regal dignity which undoubtedly marks her bearing.