And yet all the different systems of philosophy and education (some absurd enough) that were tried on herself and her two children by the Princess, were adopted and abandoned with such earnestness of purpose, such a single-eyed desire to do not only right but the _best_, that we feel the Sacred Heart must have been touched; and we do not wonder that our generous God should have made all things co-operate unto good to that favored mother and son, who were by and by to love Him with a love nothing short of heroic. Demetrius had a prodigious memory, and in his old age could still describe how when he was four years old he was taken to see the Empress Catherine, who petted the pretty, fair-haired, blue-eyed child, and then and there presented him with that ensign's commission in the Russian army which was destined to be the source of so much trouble. He remembered those early days and their sumptuous elegance, in which, as to the manner born, he had been the little tyrant, ordering about servants and serfs in most lordly style. But soon all that was changed: he was required to live in quite a poor way, to wait upon himself, and not to be spared the rod for childish misdemeanors. In a memorandum from the Princess to the children's tutor we find the following: "Keep a sharp lookout on the children's chief faults. Mimi is talkative, vindictive and quarrelsome; and Mitri gives me much pain by his inveterate laziness and absurd want of pluck." Very serious are her letters to her son, who was, after all, but a little boy. On his fourteenth birthday she wrote to him: "My thoughts to-day are a mixture of joy and dread. My first thought on awaking was certainly one of joy, love and gratitude that God had given you to me,--that He had granted me the grace to bring a soul into the world, destined, perhaps, to eternal salvation. But, oh, this 'perhaps'! Here came another cruel thought, fraught with fear and great uneasiness. To-day I said to myself: 'He has lived fourteen years, and he is still, alas! quite will-less and colorless, creeping along life according to the lead and will-power of others.' This terrible thought suggested the doubt whether this being I had brought into the world could ever grow up into a man pleasing to God, an heir of salvation; or whether, in spite of all the excellent gifts bestowed upon him by an all-good Creator to enable him to be one of the best and happiest of men; whether in spite of my anxieties, prayers, entreaties, he would continue to hasten on toward destruction.