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 She had always cherished a secret desire to behold a crowned head—a desire of which she was a little ashamed, in her republican heart, yet which rose to fever heat when the papers announced the coming visit of the young Prince of Wales to this country. His head, to be sure, had not yet been crowned, but was he not the next heir to the great throne of England, and was he not a youth in whom past and future united to produce an historic and romantic personage of the first water? And she, Martha Hazeldean (for so she still called herself in her moments of exaltation), she was to behold with her own eyes this royal boy. She eagerly read all the newspaper items which heralded and accompanied his visit to Canada, whilst Harper's Weekly, to which she was a subscriber, acquired a new and dramatic interest when portraits of the young prince began to appear among the illustrations of that admirable paper.

Ben was, of course, well aware of his wife's state of mind. If he had tried to do so, he could not have shared her feeling, and it never occurred to him to try. Ben was not sufficiently subtle to make any endeavors to cultivate sentiments which did not spring up of their own accord. He was republican to the core, and he could not see that Queen Victoria's son was necessarily more interesting than his own boys. That a great country, which had emancipated itself at the cost of blood and treasure from all the "folderol" of