Thirty years rolled away and I saw the good Queen again.  The Albert Memorial, erected to the handsome Prince Consort, whom she idolized, had just been completed, and one morning the Queen came incognito to make her first private inspection of the memorial.  Through the intimation of a friend I hurried at once to the Park, and found a small company of people gathered there.  Her Majesty had just come, accompanied by Prince Arthur, the Princess Louise and the young Princess Beatrice; and they were examining the gorgeous new structure.  The Queen wore a plain black silk dress and her children were very plainly attired, so that they looked like a group of good, honest republicans.  The only evidence of royalty was that the company of gentlemen who were pointing out to the Queen the various beauties of the monument just completed were careful not to turn their backs upon Her Majesty.  I observed that when her children bade her “good morning” they kneeled and kissed her hand.  She remained sitting in her carriage for some time, chatting and laughing with her daughter Beatrice.  Her countenance had become very florid and her figure very stout.  The last time that I saw her driving in the Park her full, rubicund face made her look not only like the venerable grandmother of a host of descendants, but of the whole vast empire on which the sun never sets.  Last year the most beloved sovereign that has ever occupied the British throne was laid in the gorgeous mausoleum at Frogmore beside the husband of her youth and the sharer of twenty-two years of happy and holy wedlock.  All Christendom was a mourner beside that royal tomb.

From London I went on a very brief visit to Paris, at the time when Louis Phillipe was at the height of his power and apparently securely seated on his throne.  Within a half a dozen years from that time he was a refugee in disguise, and the kingdom of France was followed by the Republic of Lamartine.  My brief visit to Paris was made more agreeable by the fact that my kinsman, the Hon. Henry Ledyard, was then in charge of the American Embassy, in the absence of his father-in-law, General Lewis Cass, our Ambassador, who had returned to America for a visit.  The one memorable incident of that brief sojourn in Paris that I shall recall was a visit to the tomb of Napoleon, whose remains had been brought home the year before from the Island of St. Helena.  Passing through the Place de la Concord and crossing the Seine, a ten minutes’ walk brought me to the Hospital des Invalides.  I reached it in the morning when the court in front was filled with about three hundred veterans on an early parade.  Many of them were the shattered relics of Napoleon’s Grand Army—­glorious old fellows in cocked hats and long blue coats, and weather-beaten as the walls around them.  After a few moments I hurried into the Rotunda, which is nearly one hundred feet in height, surrounded by six small recesses, or alcoves.  “Where is Napoleon?” said I to one of the sentinels.  “There,”