ed; for the Queen, with an
astonishing pertinacity, insisted upon communicating personally with
an ever-growing multitude of men and women who had suffered through the
war.

By the end of the year the last remains of her ebbing strength had
almost deserted her; and through the early days of the opening century
it was clear that her dwindling forces were only kept together by an
effort of will. On January 14, she had at Osborne an hour's interview
with Lord Roberts, who had returned victorious from South Africa a few
days before. She inquired with acute anxiety into all the details of the
war; she appeared to sustain the exertion successfully; but, when
the audience was over, there was a collapse. On the following day her
medical attendants recognised that her state was hopeless; and yet, for
two days more, the indomitable spirit fought on; for two days more she
discharged the duties of a Queen of England. But after that there was
an end of working; and then, and not till then, did the last optimism of
those about her break down. The brain was failing, and life was gently
slipping away. Her family gathered round her; for a little more she
lingered, speechless and apparently insensible; and, on January 22,
1901, she died.

When, two days previously, the news of the approaching end had been made
public, astonished grief had swept over the country. It appeared as if
some monstrous reversal of the course of nature was about to take place.
The vast majority of her subjects had never known a time when Queen
Victoria had not been reigning over them. She had become an indissoluble
part of their whole scheme of things, and that they were about to lose
her appeared a scarcely possible thought. She herself, as she lay
blind and silent, seemed to those who watched her to be divested of all
thinking--to have glided already, unawares, into oblivion. Yet, perhaps,
in the secret chambers of consciousness, she had her thoughts, too.
Perhaps her fading mind called up once more the shadows of the past to
float before it, and retraced, for the last time, the vanished visions
of that long history--passing back and back, through the cloud of years,
to older and ever older memories--to the spring woods at Osborne, so
full of primroses for Lord Beaconsfield--to Lord Palmerston's queer
clothes and high demeanour, and Albert's face under the green lamp,
and Albert's first stag at Balmoral, and Albert in his blue and silver
uniform, and the Baro