every day. With whom Sophie Dorothee
has her own difficulties and abstruse practices; but struggles always
to maintain, under seven-fold secrecy, some thread of correspondence and
pious filial ministration wherever possible; that the poor exasperated
Mother, wretchedest and angriest of women, be not quite cut off from the
kinship of the living, but that some soft breath of pity may cool her
burning heart now and then. [In _Memoirs of Sophia Dorothea_ (London,
1845), ii. 385, 393, are certain fractions of this Correspondence,
"edited" in an amazing manner.] A dark tragedy of Sophie's, this; the
Bluebeard Chamber of her mind, into which no eye but her own must ever
look.

PRINCESS AMELIA COMES INTO THE WORLD.

In reference to Queen Sophie, and chronologically if not otherwise
connected with this Double-Marriage Treaty, I will mention one
other thing. Her Majesty had been in fluctuating health, all summer;
unaccountable symptoms turning up in her Majesty's constitution,
languors, qualms, especially a tendency to swelling or increase of size,
which had puzzled and alarmed her Doctors and her. Friedrich Wilhelm,
on conclusion of the Marriage-Treaty, had been appointed to join his
Father-in-law, Britannic George, at the Gohrde, in some three weeks'
time, and have a bout of hunting. On the 8th of November, bedtime
being come, he kissed his Wilhelmina and the rest, by way of good-by;
intending to start very early on the morrow:--long journey (150 miles or
so), to be done all in one day. In the dead of the night, Queen
Sophie was seized with dreadful colics,--pangs of colic or who knows
what;--Friedrich Wilhelm is summoned; rises in the highest alarm; none
but the maids and he at hand to help; and the colic, or whatever it may
be, gets more and more dreadful.

Colic? O poor Sophie, it is travail, and no colic; and a clever young
Princess is suddenly the result! None but Friedrich Wilhelm and the maid
for midwives; mother and infant, nevertheless, doing perfectly well.
Friedrich Wilhelm did not go on the morrow, but next day; laughed, ever
and anon in loud hahas, at the part he had been playing; and was very
glad and merry. How the experienced Sophie, whose twelfth child this
is, came to commit such an oversight is unaccountable; but the fact is
certain, and made a merry noise in Court circles. [Pollnitz, ii. 199;
Wilhelmina, i. 87, 88.]

The clever little Princess, now born in this manner, is known by name
to idle rea