to-night there was no alarming interlude, like a herald of evil, to shake the nerves of the company--nothing more unpropitious than the contretemps to an unlucky lady of being overcome by the heat and seized with a fainting-fit, which caused her over-zealous supporters to remove her luxuriant powdered wig in order to give her greater air and coolness, so that she was fain, the moment she recovered, to hide her diminished head by a rapid discomfited retreat from what remained of the revelry.
On the 21st of June the Queen and the Prince, with the Lords of the Admiralty, inspected the fleet off Spithead. The royal yacht was attended by a crowd of yachts belonging to the various squadrons, a throng of steamboats and countless small boats. The Queen visited and went over the flagship--which was the _St. Vincent_--the _Trafalgar_, and the Albion. On her return to the yacht she held a levee of all the captains of the fleet. A few days afterwards she reviewed her fleet in brilliant, breezy weather. The royal yacht took up its position at Spithead, and successive signals were given to the squadron to "Lower sail," "Make sail," "Shorten sail and reef," and "Furl topgallant sails," all the manoeuvres--including the getting under way and sailing in line to St. Helen's--being performed with the very perfection of nautical accuracy. The review ended with the order, "Furl sails, put the life-lines on, and man yards," which was done as only English sailors can accomplish the feat, while the royal yacht on its return passed through the squadron amidst ringing cheers.
During the earlier part of the summer Sir John Franklin sailed with his ships, the Erebus and _Terror_, in search of that North Pole which, since the days of Sir Hugh Montgomery, "a captain tall," has been at once the goal and snare of many a gallant English sailor. The good ships disappeared under the horizon, never to reach their haven. By slow degrees oblivion, more or less profound, closed over the fate of officers and men, while, for lack of knowledge of their life or death, the light of many a hearth was darkened, and faithful hearts sickened with hope deferred and broke under the strain. As one instance, out of many, of the desolation which the silent loss of the gallant expedition occasioned, sorrow descended heavily on one of the happy Highland homes among which the Queen had dwelt the previous summer. Captain, afterwards Lord James, Murray, brother of Lord Glenlyon, was married to Miss Fairholme, sister of one of the picked men of whom the explorers were composed. When no tidings of him came, year after year, from the land of mist and darkness, pining melancholy seized upon her and made her its prey.
In the month of July the King of the Netherlands, who, as Prince of Orange, had served on the Duke of Wellington's staff at the close of the Peninsular War, came to England and took up his quarters at Mivart's Hotel, the Queen being in the Isle of Wight, where he joined her. Prince Albert met the King at Gosport and escorted him to Osborne. On his return to London the King, who was already a general in the English army, received his appointment as field-marshal, and reviewed the Household troops in Hyde Park. He paid a second visit to the Queen at Osborne before he left Woolwich for Holland.
A curious accident happened when the Queen prorogued Parliament on the 9th of August. The Duke of Argyle, an elderly man, was carrying the crown on a velvet cushion, when, in walking backwards before the Queen, he appeared to forget the two steps, leading from the platform on which the throne stands to the floor, and stumbled, the crown slipping from the cushion and falling to the ground, with the loss of some diamonds. The Queen expressed her concern for the Duke instead of for the crown; but on her departure the keeper of the House of Lords appeared in front of the throne, and prevented too near an approach to it, with the chance of further damage to the dropped jewels. The misadventure was naturally the subject of a good deal of private conversation in the House.
CHAPTER III
.
THE QUEEN'S FIRST VISIT TO GERMANY.
On the evening of the day that she prorogued Parliament, the Queen and the Prince with the Earl of Aberdeen as the minister in attendance, started from Buckingham Palace that she might pay her first visit to Germany. Surely none of all the new places she had visited within the last few years could have been of such surpassing interest to the traveller. It was her mother's country as well as her husband's, the home of her brother and sister, the place of which she must have heard, with which
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