The Highlanders about them, a primitive, but very proud people, regarded their Sovereign and her husband with no servile awe. With them, even respect begins, like charity, at home; what there is left, they give loyally to their superiors in rank. To the Queen and her family they have given more,—love and free-hearted devotion. Her Majesty has always gone about among the poorer tenants of the estate, like any laird's wife, in an unpretending, neighborly way; and they, thanks to their good Scotch sense and Highland pride, never take advantage of the uncondescending condescension, to offend her by too great familiarity, or shock her by servility. Taking up her "Journal," I have chanced upon an account given by Her Majesty of a round of visits to the cottages of certain "poor old women," and here is an entry or two:
"Before we went into any, we met a woman who was very poor, and eighty- eight years old. I gave her a warm petticoat, and the tears rolled down her old cheeks, and she shook my hands and prayed God to bless me: it was very touching.
"I went into a small cabin of old Kitty Kear's, who is eighty-six years old, quite-erect, and who welcomed us with a great air of dignity. She sat down and spun. I gave her, also, a warm petticoat. She said, 'May the Lord ever attend ye and yours, here and hereafter; and may the Lord be a guide to ye, and keep ye fra all harm.'"
Now, some readers, whose ideas of royal charities are derived from the kings and queens of melodrama, who fling about golden largess, or "chuck" plethoric purses at their poor subjects, may be amused at these entries in a great Queen's journal, but "let them laugh who win"—the flannel petticoats.
During a later visit to the widowed Queen at Balmoral, Dr. McLeod writes: "After dinner, the Queen invited me to her room, where I found the Princess Helena and the Marchioness of Ely. The Queen sat down to spin on a fine Scotch wheel, while I read Burns to her—'Tam O'Shanter,' and 'A Man's a Man for a' That'—her favorites."
In the Queen's book I find frequent pleasant mention of the young
Highlander, John Brown—a favorite personal attendant, first of Prince
Albert, and afterwards of Her Majesty.
She had the misfortune to lose this "good and faithful servant," in the early part of this year. In a foot-note in her "Journal," she paid a grateful tribute to his "attention, care and faithfulness"—to his rare devotion to her, especially during a period of physical weakness and nervous prostration, when such service as his was invaluable. She also says of him, "He has all the independence and elevation of feeling peculiar to the Highland race, and is singularly straightforward, simple- minded, kind-hearted and disinterested."
If there is something touching in the nearly life-long service and devotion of the Highlander, almost always seen so close behind his Liege Lady, when she appeared in public, that he was named "the Queen's shadow"—there is something admirable in her grateful appreciation of that service, in her frank acknowledgment of all she has owed of comfort, in a constant sense of security, to this man's steadfast faithfulness; and now that the "shadow" has gone before, I hold it is only fitting and loyal in her to acknowledge for him, as she does, "friendship," and even "affection"—not only to lay flowers on his grave, but to pay more enduring tribute to his honest memory. He was a Highland gillie, of simple Highland ways and words but "A man's a man for a' that." If Byron could nurse his dying dog, Boatswain, and erect a monument to his memory, and not lose, but gain, our respect by so doing, we surely might let pass, unquestioned, the Queen's grief for a faithful human creature— for thirty-four years devoted to her—ever at her call—looking up to her, yet watching over her; a friend, whose humble good sense and canny bits of counsel must often, in the simpler, yet not simple, affairs of her complex life, be sorely missed.
That is how it strikes an American, of democratic tendencies.
About a year after the death of Prince Albert, the Duchess of Sutherland presented to the Queen a richly-bound Bible, the offering of loyal "English widows."