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Show A FAMOUS PILGRIMAGE - The woes and sufferings of princesses have always evoked the ready sympathy of mankind. Whether it be Dido or Zenobia, Mary Queen of Scots, or Catherine of Arragon [Aragon], Marie Antoinette, the Empress Josephine, or Carlotta, the popular heart is touched by the misery which fate has bequeathed them, even when they have simply fallen heir to their own follies or their own perversity. In spite of the growing penuriousness, self-assertion, and obstinacy which Queen Victoria has more and more displayed since Prince Albert's common sense ceased to control her, the profound love for him which her profound grief for his loss so clearly betrays, has kept the hearts of her people tender and considerate; and it has surrounded an otherwise hard and unromantic figure with an atmosphere of romance which will attend her while she lives and enshroud her when she dies. In spite of the sorry story of an unprofitable reign ending in a national catastrophe, the touching devotion of Eugenie, the mother, to a dutiful and affectionate son, softens and colors the desolate life and retributive fate of the ex Empress of the French. There is little respect either for the prowess or the good sense of the youth who met his death, while rashly meddling in a vulgar war of conquest, in the hopes that from those barbarian squabbles he might wrest a few laurels to be at some lucky moment worn with his Imperial crown; but the relations between the Prince Imperial and his unselfish mother command the admiration and sympathy of the world. Even if there are those who think that a journey to the wilds of South Africa is a superfluous and sentimental way of indulging her mother's love and assuaging the aching of her heart, they can hardly fail to confess that her pilgrimage in frail health, from the comforts of an English home to the jungles of the Zulu country, is a tribute to her sincerity which should command the deepest reverence and the noblest compassion. [unreadable line]. With a minuteness and [unreadable] only of her afflictions, she has traced, on the anniversary of each day, the adventures and the wanderings which her son experienced a year ago. Exactly one year from every date she has seen the country as it appeared to his eyes the year before; the water courses, in which the Zulus were hid in ambush; the tall grass, from behind which they plunged, in their sudden attack; the pumpkin vines trailed upon a ruined wall where the prince and his suite bivouacked for the last time. She sees the hill on which he sat sketching, the spot where he laid down to smoke a cigarette, and afterwards stood, watch in hand, waiting for the hour of four when he intended taking his departure. It was here his horse was brought him, and here where just as he was mounting came the volley that put them all to flight, leaving him while trying to gain his saddle, to be surrounded by the savages. At this spot, now marked with a marble cross, which is enwreathed with immortelles and bears an honorable inscription, she knelt, and, by solemn masses for the dead, consecrated the place to the memory of her dead boy. One may entertain reproaches, indignation and contempt for the haughty and unscrupulous dynasty which is just now most conspiculously [conspicuously] represented by a lone woman, who, at the grave of her idolized son in the grass plains of Zululand, is seeking the consolations of the Christian Church; but no one can withhold a sad and reverent sympathy for the heart-broken mother who vainly weeps at the foot of the cross which commemorates all she holds dear in a world that was once so large and bright to her. -Detroit Press. |