ar, on the days that followed her arrival, a solemn
pilgrimage of inspection and meditation was performed. There, on August
26--Albert's birthday--at the foot of the bronze statue of him in
Highland dress, the Queen, her family, her Court, her servants, and her
tenantry, met together and in silence drank to the memory of the dead.
In England the tokens of remembrance pullulated hardly less. Not a
day passed without some addition to the multifold assemblage--a gold
statuette of Ross, the piper--a life-sized marble group of Victoria and
Albert, in medieval costume, inscribed upon the base with the words:
"Allured to brighter worlds and led the way-" a granite slab in the
shrubbery at Osborne, informing the visitor of "Waldmann: the very
favourite little dachshund of Queen Victoria; who brought him from
Baden, April 1872; died, July 11, 1881."

At Frogmore, the great mausoleum, perpetually enriched, was visited
almost daily by the Queen when the Court was at Windsor. But there was
another, a more secret and a hardly less holy shrine. The suite of rooms
which Albert had occupied in the Castle was kept for ever shut away
from the eyes of any save the most privileged. Within those precincts
everything remained as it had been at the Prince's death; but the
mysterious preoccupation of Victoria had commanded that her husband's
clothing should be laid afresh, each evening, upon the bed, and that,
each evening, the water should be set ready in the basin, as if he were
still alive; and this incredible rite was performed with scrupulous
regularity for nearly forty years.

Such was the inner worship; and still the flesh obeyed the spirit; still
the daily hours of labour proclaimed Victoria's consecration to duty
and to the ideal of the dead. Yet, with the years, the sense of
self-sacrifice faded; the natural energies of that ardent being
discharged themselves with satisfaction into the channel of public work;
the love of business which, from her girlhood, had been strong within
her, reasserted itself in all its vigour, and, in her old age, to
have been cut off from her papers and her boxes would have been, not a
relief, but an agony to Victoria. Thus, though toiling Ministers might
sigh and suffer, the whole process of government continued, till the
very end, to pass before her. Nor was that all; ancient precedent
had made the validity of an enormous number of official transactions
dependent upon the application of the royal sign-ma