Democratic Sentinel, Volume 21, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 10 September 1897 — A Queen's Visit. [ARTICLE]

A Queen's Visit.

To be old and poor and bedridden Is generally to be debarred from the greater privileges of life, but there was one old man in Scotland who found his disadvantages had procured him a privilege that the strong and more active members of his family were seeking in vain. It was on an occasion when Queen Victoria was at Balmoral, and, as she often did, she went one day, unaccompanied, to visit the cottages. In one of tiiese she found an old man, bedridden and quite alone, and she sat down to talk to him. “And how Is it you are alone?” she asked. “Have you no one to keep you company?” “No,” replied the old man, innocently, “my folks be all away seeing the Queen; they thought they might get a glimpse of her.” His visitor made no reply, but she sat with the old man, pleasantly filling the gap made by the absence of “his folks,” and then found time to read to him from the Bible she herself treasured. On leaving she gave a further proof of her sympathy in the shape of a five-pound note, acompanying it with the words: “When your people come back, tell them that while they have been to see the Queen, the Queen has been to see you.”