ROYAL CHILDREN.
On the occasion to which I have last referred, one of the royal carriages contained three children, two boys and a girl, with their tutor and governess. The girl was Leopold's only daughter, and her name was identical with that of his first wife, Charlotte. The little Belgian princess was then eleven years of age, and was exceedingly pretty. She was delicately fair, blue-eyed, and flaxen-haired, and appeared to appreciate highly the popular acclamations which were frequently announced as specially intended for her. The joyous countenance, irradiated by the excitement incident to demonstrations of enthusiastic approbation, seemed inaccessible to the wrinkles of care, and exempt from the lachrymal effects of sorrow. Nevertheless, that royal child has furnished a most piteous instance of the mutability of fortune, of accumulated miseries substituted for the apparent approach of transcendent happiness. To her have been allotted
"The hopes that but allure to fly,
The joys that vanish while we sip;
Like Dead-Sea fruits that tempt the eye,
But turn to ashes on the lip!"
In about six years after the time to which my reminiscence refers, she became the consort of Ferdinand Maximilian, eldest brother of the Emperor of Austria, who subsequently, at the instance of Napoleon the Third, assumed the title of Emperor of Mexico, but having utterly failed in his efforts to establish the Imperial authority to which he aspired, was shot as a culprit, by order of the President Juarez, in 1867, leaving his bereaved widow in such affliction as to produce a state of insanity from which she is not expected to recover.