play and scandal, and prove in Queen Caroline an appreciation of "culture," and a longing for better things than the ordinary growth of St. James's and the other Courts. She needed all the mental stimulus she could get, for her evenings she had to spend in "knotting," while the King sat by and railed against everything and everybody. "Main good at pumping," Walpole found she had become by dint of practice; a good hater, too; and a good dissembler; but patient almost beyond example among women, exercising her patience for the good of her husband and his subjects.

Horace Walpole says she thought too highly of her power of managing others, and hints that her plans were oftener seen through than she imagined. But Horace was her special aversion, though she thought so highly of his brother; and he knew it.

If, as they say, she never looked up after receiving a specially unkind letter from the Prince of Wales, we may agree with the Duchess of Orleans, that she had a heart.

Her spelling was as bad as that of the great French ladies of a generation earlier; for instance, one would hardly recognise Leibnitz's "Theodicé" under such a phonetic form as "Deody ces."

Her granddaughter, Caroline Matilda, posthumous child of the Prince of Wales, was married at fifteen to the Danish Prince Royal, afterwards Christian the Seventh, a feeble-minded, self-indulgent lad, who began by treating her coldly, and soon neglected her for others. His girl-wife's friends and advisers were all sent away, and in her loneliness she began to attach herself to Struensee, the King's physician, a confirmed lady-killer. He, at first, exerted himself honestly to bring the King and Queen to a better understanding; but when he was appointed Councillor and Reader to King and Queen, he thought the latter might help him to greatness. So, with Brandt, an ex-page, and Charles, Count of Rantzau, he compassed the fall of Minister Bernstorff, and the three formed a Government which was to give freedom to the Press and to effect many other reforms. For a while, Struensee seemed to have everything in his hands; he and Brandt were made Counts; his orders were declared to be as valid as if signed by the King. Altogether, except that it ended tragically, the situation was not unlike that in the novel called "King Otto." The Queen and Struensee set Mrs.

Grundy at defiance; she in her ridinghabit, walking arm-in-arm with him past the corpse of the Queen Dowager, which was lying in state. The Court was full of his creatures; almost all "people of quality" kept away from it; and an eye-witness said it looked like a pack of servants, who, in their master's absence, were playing at high life below stairs.

Meanwhile, the people began to grow discontented. They had expected the reforms would bring about a golden age, and were disappointed. Brandt, too, unlike Struensee, who seems to have been severely upright in money matters, began to put his hands into the Royal treasury. Popular suspicion, once roused, began spreading the wildest rumours. The King was to be seized and imprisoned, and the Queen made Regent-an absurd changefor the presence of this poor specimen of a King, who was qualifying for delirium tremens, and could find no other fault with his sprightly wife, but "elle est si blonde," was of course a protection to the triumvirate. However, nothing came of the popular discontent; a riot of Norwegian sailors was put down; and it was only when the three began to quarrel, Brandt plotting to get rid of Struensee, and then Rantzau determining to overthrow them both, that they fell. The story goes that Sir R. Murray Keith, our envoy, offered Struensee a large sum of money if he would leave the kingdom; and that the Queen said: "If he goes I shall go too, and shall get my bread by singing. I know I've got a pleasant voice." As he would not go, the Queen Dowager, Juliana Maria, was won over by Rantzau showing her a forged conspiracy for putting her son off the throne. Her help made Rantzau strong enough to act, for it carried with it the guards who had mutinied at Christmas, but had been won back by her intervention. And so, in mid January, at a masked ball at the Palace, Struensee and Brandt, and their chief supporters were arrested, and Caroline and her little daughter were hurriedly driven to Kronberg, a castle near Elsinore. As she looked back she saw Copenhagen in a blaze of light; the people, in whose service Struensee had, at first, really worked hard, thus showed their joy at the fall of Queen and favourite. Keith did not desert her, advising her, when a Commission begana parallel to our Prince Regent's "delicate inquiry "-not to answer, but to dispute the authority of the Court. Her daughter's

legitimacy was satisfactorily established; while as to her guilt-well, at last Struensee, probably under torture, confessed; but about her there are the most contradictory reports.

Everything respecting her, during this stay at Kronberg, is open to doubt; except the two facts that she affectionately nursed her daughter through measles, and that she was preached to by a succession of Court divines. Her letters to her brother George are said to be unauthentic; so is the statement that she confessed on being assured that her doing so would save Struensee's life. Her advocate, Uldall, says she strongly asserted her innocence. Guilty, or not guilty, she was condemned; her marriage declared null and void; and her name struck out of the Prayer Book; while Struensee and Brandt were of course put to death. George the Third at first threatened; but afterwards he was persuaded that things had best be taken quietly. The public, however, made his apathy a ground for bullying Lord North's Government; and when news came that Caroline was to be banished to Aalborg in Jutland, a squadron was ordered to sail for Copenhagen. A few hours before it weighed anchor, word arrived that Keith's advice had prevailed, and that Caroline was to be set free, retaining the title of Queen, and solaced with a pension of five thousand pounds a year. Three English frigates went to see her safely out of Danish waters; and she left Elsinore under a Royal salute, taking up her abode at Celle, near Hanover, where a Court was organised for her in due form by those Past Masters in Royal etiquette, the Hanoverian authorities. Here she had a theatre, a "jardin français," plenty of English books, and the company of Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, a young traveller in search of adventure, who came as secret agent of a knot of exiled Danish nobles at Hamburg. Their object was to get up a revolution, and to restore Caroline and themselves. She was willing enough, but wished to get help and countenance from her brother. Wraxall posted off to London; but George was cautious. He would be delighted at their success; but, in his position, he really could not help them actively. Wraxall did not despair; and was still in London when news came of the Queen's death.

"Poison," said the gossips. "Inflammation of the throat," said the doctors. Diphtheria," we should say; for she had

spent a good deal of time in dressing fantastically the death chamber of a page whom she kept more than a week "lying in state."

Is her death-bed letter to her brother asseverating her innocence, authentic, and did she at the last make a similar statement to her pastor? Anyhow, Pastor Lehzen published an edifying account and Wraxall, in the "Annual Register," stoutly defended her. She may have been only injudicious; wholly unfit to stand in the fierce light that beats upon a throne; culpably regardless of Mrs. Grundy, as is shown by her penchant for male costume. A portrait at Copenhagen represents her riding like a man in "man's" dress.

Few private people can venture to act out the motto, which the Scotch laird put over his gate: "Men say: what say they Who cares what they say?" Certainly no Royalties can do so, as the third of our Carolines also found to her cost. She, Caroline Amelia Elizabeth, of Brunswick Wolfenbüttel, must have been a very fascinating girl. Fond of children, she would stop in her walks to pet them. Everybody who has written about her says what a kind, good-hearted child she was. The Duke of York was so charmed with what he saw of her at her father's Court, that he recommended her as a suitable bride for the Prince of Wales. The nation wanted an heir to the throne; and the Prince wanted his debts paid. So a bargain was struck; his income was raised from sixty thousand pounds to one hundred and twenty-five thousand pounds, of which twenty-five thousand pounds were to be set aside to pay the six hundred and thirty thousand pounds which he owed. The he was to have twenty-seven thousand pounds for wedding expenses, twenty-eight thousand pounds for jewels and plate, and twenty-six thousand pounds to complete Carlton House. A pretty good bribe, that, considering the value of money a century ago, even for a Prince by no means disposed to matrimony-already married, in a good many people's eyes, to Mrs. Fitzherbert. His bride was to have a jointure of fifty thousand a year. How they voted away the public money in those good old days!

Her

and

Caroline Amelia was moderate. father's Court, though as gay and lively as most North German Courts have always been stiff and dull, was not expensive; she positively refused to have more than thirty-five thousand pounds a year settled on her.

In those days, even Royal brides were at

gered the wise man, and he relapsed into the vague again.

"Be firm with him, show him what you expect of him."

66 Yes, and he will show me what he expects of me, and I shall probably see more clearly."

"Oh, if you choose to be so weakminded- "" dismissing the subject.

He could not help her; no one could help her. The sorrow was her own, and she must bear it; but it was hard.

Young Tom had already descended to a deeper depth than his father had ever reached, or at least she thought so, for towards strangers old Tom had always been honest.

She could not tell her son what she had discovered-which Mr. Lipsilt would have characterised as more of her weakmindedness-but she could not keep the chill of a new disgust out of her bearing.

a cold, dead thing into the silent depths of her heart, and lay hidden there.

ever

The winter seemed colder than that year, and poor, paralytic Tom suffered sorely for want of the flannels she had been unable to procure him. Young Tom, too, hung over the small fire in an uncomfortable, suffering way, and the mother's heart, despite its indignation, was not proof against his pain. Of course, she did her best, mending and patching and darning for them all; but threadbare clothing, however tidy, is powerless against the incisiveness of a black frost. And Gordon helped her a good deal with his deft, quick fingers; but, as young Tom assured him contemptuously, fiddling over woman's work is not earning money. Like other ne'er-do-weels, Tom was very impatient of uselessness in any but himself.

him?"

"My own children are all worthless," the poor woman told herself, unconsciously binding her affections more closely round her nurseling.

She had not answered Elsie's letter, nor taken any notice of the tidings she had had from home. Her mother was dead-gone, therefore, beyond the reach of reproach or pardon. As to what she had left behind her, "Let them keep it," Mrs. Rayne said to herself bitterly. "It is not likely to bring them a blessing; but, if it does, my grudging it won't matter."

Mrs. Rayne's ideas of blessings were a little confused. She had always striven for what she called blessings, and they had eluded her; and yet, in spite of her own experiences, she clung to the belief, inculcated in her childhood, that wrong-doing is punished even in this world, and that right, in spite of everything, is best.

Of her disappointment in the matter of the money from home she did not speak to anyone. What was the use? If her father had only appointed an executor to the will other than her mother, the thing that was done would have been impossible; but, since he had omitted this, there was nothing more to be said. Mrs. Rayne did not believe in stirring in stagnant waters. Her pain and disappointment dropped like

Oh, father!"

Tom had his own opinion of the merit in father's claims.

But these claims relaxed their weak hold a month or two later. In the cold dawn of a spring morning the angel of Death passed by the poor rooms the Raynes inhabited, and the invalid's sleep merged into that which knows no awaking.

A pauper funeral, that was all they could give poor Tom; but tears as bitter as were ever shed for rank or worth, fell by the grave. All the selfishness of his young manhood, all the tyrannies of his middle age, were forgotten now. There are natures from which a little tardy gentleness effaces completely all recollection of half a lifetime of wrong. As she saw the clay fall on his coffin, Tom Rayne's widow remembered and mourned him as he had been in the early days when she had believed in him.

As to Gordon, he could recall nothing of Tom but kindness-little services undertaken on his behalf; little games suggested by him, in which there lay unending treasures of quiet enjoyment. And then those wonderful stories of Tom's, how could Gordon ever forget them-stories of far-off lands, rich in clever people, rich in friendship, rich in gold?

"When I'm a man," Gordon thoughtdrawing in a deep breath at the words"when I'm a man

! "

It was strange how they all missed Tom; and yet not strange either, since it is always those who have demanded most of us who