they must have been horribly inconvenient. I determined early in life to affect, when grown-up, longer whiskers than any one else—if possible down to my waist; but alas for human aspirations! By the time that I had emerged from my chrysalis stage, Dundreary whiskers had ceased to be the fashion; added to which unkind Nature had given me a hairless face.

My uncle, old Lord Claud Hamilton, known in our family as "The Dowager," adhered, to the day of his death, to the William IV. style of dress. He wore an old-fashioned black-satin stock right up to his chin, with white "gills" above, and was invariably seen in a blue coat with brass buttons, and a buff waistcoat. My uncle was one of the handsomest men in England, and had sat for nearly forty years in Parliament. He had one curious faculty. He could talk fluently and well on almost any topic at indefinite length, a very useful gift in the House of Commons of those days. On one occasion when it was necessary "to talk a Bill out," he got up without any preparation whatever, and addressed the House in flowing periods for four hours and twenty minutes. His speech held the record for length for many years, but it was completely eclipsed in the early "eighties" by the late Mr. Biggar, who spoke (if my memory serves me right) for nearly six hours on one occasion. Biggar, however, merely read interminable extracts from Blue Books, whereas my uncle indulged in four hours of genuine rhetorical declamation. My uncle derived his nickname from the fact that in our family the second son is invariably christened Claud, so I had already a brother of that name. There happen to be three Lord Claud Hamiltons living now, of three successive generations.

I shall never forget my bitter disappointment the first time I was taken, at a very early age, to see Queen Victoria. I had pictured to myself a dazzling apparition arrayed in sumptuous robes, seated on a golden throne; a glittering crown on her head, a sceptre in one hand, an orb grasped in the other. I had fancied Her Majesty seated thus, motionless during the greater part of the twenty-four hours, simply "reigning." I could have cried with disappointment when a middle-aged lady, simply dressed in widow's "weeds" and wearing a widow's cap, rose from an ordinary arm-chair to receive us. I duly made my bow, but having a sort of idea that it had to be indefinitely repeated, went on nodding like a porcelain Chinese mandarin, until ordered to stop.

Between ourselves, I behaved far better than a brother of mine once did under similar circumstances. Many years before I was born, my father lent his Scotch house to Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort for ten days. This entailed my two eldest sisters and two eldest brothers vacating their nurseries in favour of the Royal children, and their being transferred to the farm, where they had very cramped quarters indeed. My second brother deeply resented being turned out of his comfortable nursery, and refused to be placated. On the day after the Queen's arrival, my mother took her four eldest children to present them to Her Majesty, my sisters dressed in their best clothes, my brothers being in kilts. They were duly instructed as to how they were to behave, and upon being presented, my two sisters made their curtsies, and my eldest brother made his best bow. "And this, your Majesty, is my second boy. Make your bow, dear," said my mother; but my brother, his heart still hot within him at being expelled from his nursery, instead of bowing, STOOD ON HIS HEAD IN HIS KILT, and remained like that, an accomplishment of which he was very proud. The Queen was exceedingly angry, so later in the day, upon my brother professing deep penitence, he was taken back to make his apologies, when he did precisely the same thing over again, and was consequently in disgrace during the whole of the Royal visit. In strict confidence, I believe that he would still do it to-day, more than seventy-two years later.

During her stay in my father's house the Queen quite unexpectedly announced that she meant to give a dance. This put my mother in a great difficulty, for my sisters had no proper clothes for a ball, and in those pre-railway days it would have taken at least ten days to get anything from Edinburgh or Glasgow. My mother had a sudden inspiration. The muslin curtains in the drawing-room! The drawing-room curtains were at once commandeered; the ladies'-maids set to work with a will, and I believe that my sisters looked extremely well dressed in the curtains, looped up with bunches of rowan or mountain-ash berries.

My mother was honoured with Queen Victoria's close friendship and confidence for over fifty years. At the time of her death she had in her possession a numerous collection of letters from the Queen, many of them very long ones. By the express terms of my mother's will, those letters will never be published. Many of them touch on exceedingly private matters relating to the Royal family, others refer to various political problems of the day. I have read all those letters carefully, and I fully endorse my mother's views. She was honoured with the confidence of her Sovereign, and that confidence cannot be betrayed. The letters are in safe custody, and there they will remain. On reading them it is impossible not to be struck with Queen Victoria's amazing shrewdness, and with her unfailing common sense. It so happens that both a brother and a sister of mine, the late Duchess of Buccleuch, were brought into very close contact with Queen Victoria. It was this quality of strong common sense in the Queen which continually impressed them, as well as her very high standard of duty.

My brother George was twice Secretary of State for India. The Queen was fond of suggesting amendments in the wording of dispatches relating to India, whilst not altering their sense. My brother tells me that the alterations suggested by the Queen were invariably in the direction of simplification. The Queen had a knack of stripping away unnecessary verbiage and reducing a sentence to its simplest form, in which its meaning was unmistakably clear.

All Queen Victoria's tastes were simple. She liked simplicity in dress, in food, and in her surroundings. If I may say so without disrespect, I think that Queen Victoria's great hold on her people came from the fact that, in spite of her high station, she had the ideals, the tastes, the likes and dislikes of the average clean-living, clean-minded wife of the average British professional man, together with the strict ideals as to the sanctity of the marriage-tie, the strong sense of duty, and the high moral standard such wives usually possess.

It is, of course, the easy fashion now to sneer at Victorian standards. To my mind they embody all that is clean and sound in the nation. It does not follow that because Victorians revelled in hideous wall-papers and loved ugly furniture, that therefore their points-of-view were mistaken ones. There are things more important than wall-papers. They certainly liked the obvious in painting, in music, and perhaps in literature, but it hardly seems to follow logically from that, that their conceptions of a man's duty to his wife, family, and country were necessarily false ones. They were not afflicted with the perpetual modern restlessness, nor did they spend "their time in nothing else, but either to tell, or to hear some new thing"; still, all their ideas seem to me eminently sweet and wholesome.

In her old age my mother was the last person living who had seen George III. She remembered perfectly seeing the old King, in one of his rare lucid intervals, driving through London, when he was enthusiastically cheered.

She was also the last person alive who had been at Carlton House which was pulled down in 1826. My mother at the age of twelve danced as a solo "The Spanish Shawl dance" before George IV. at the Pavilion, Brighton. The King was so delighted with her dancing that he went up to her and said, "You are a very pretty little girl, and you dance charmingly. Now is there anything I can do for you?" The child answered,