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Norman McLeod has left a record of the widowed Queen's first visit to Balmoral. It seems he thought she was too unreconciled to her loss, and felt it his duty to preach what he believed to be "truth in God's sight, and that which I believe she needed," he said, "though I felt it would be very trying for her to receive it."
Balmoral the dear mountain-home, so entirely her husband's creation now became more than ever dear to the Queen, and has never lost its charm for her. Her life there has been, from the first, almost pastoral in its simplicity. The Highlanders about them, a primitive, but very proud people, regarded their Sovereign and her husband with no servile awe.
That which he loved best, planning and planting the grounds of Osborne and Balmoral and superintending building, he cheerfully sacrificed for works of public utility. He inaugurated and urged forward many benevolent and scientific enterprises, and schools of art and music.
He was a sojourner at Windsor, and a visitor at Balmoral. He delighted in gold sticks, and was never so happy as when holding some cap of maintenance or spur of precedence with due dignity and acknowledged grace in the presence of all the Court.
The man from Balmoral brightened up, as he answered: "I am inclined to believe that my partner, Egbert Bunbury, stole them, sir. When he went to propose to Miss Olivano, the Countess's maid, yesterday afternoon, I saw something sparkling in his hand." "Think he intended to give her a diamond cuff-button, instead of a diamond ring, Donald?" queried Holmes. "Well, who can say?
For many years Dr. Norman Macleod, an innocent Scotch minister, was her principal spiritual adviser; and, when he was taken from her, she drew much comfort from quiet chats about life and death with the cottagers at Balmoral. Her piety, absolutely genuine, found what it wanted in the sober exhortations of old John Grant and the devout saws of Mrs. P. Farquharson.
All the last years of Sir Edwin Landseer' life, the royal family were his devoted and comforting friends. The painter suffered much and during his visits to Balmoral he wrote to his sister how the Queen used to go several times a day to his room, to look after his comfort and to inquire about his condition. He wrote: "The Queen kindly commands me to get well here.
But one or two points that were made in the course of the debates which occupied Parliament for the rest of the year 1912 claim a moment's notice in their bearing on the subject in hand. Mr. Bonar Law lost no time in fully redeeming the promises he made at Balmoral.
With that merciful blindness which alone prevents all our lives from becoming a horror of nerveless reproach, his parents were equally unaware of their share in the harm done him, when they ascribed to his delicate organization the fact that, at an age when love runs riot in all healthy blood, he could not see a balmoral without his cheeks rivaling the most vivid stripe in it.
In August the Queen and the Prince made one of their yachting excursions to the Channel Islands. The Duchess of Kent's seventy-third birthday was kept at Osborne. During the autumn stay of the Court at Balmoral, the Prince presided over the British Association for the Promotion of Science, which met that year at Aberdeen.
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