A peculiar duty during my last stay in St. Petersburg was to watch the approach of cholera, especially on the Persian frontier. Admirable precautions had been taken for securing telegraphic information; and every day I received notices from the Foreign Office as a result, which I communicated to Washington. For ages Russia had relied on fetishes of various kinds to preserve her from great epidemics; but at last her leading officials had come to realize the necessity of applying modern science to the problem, and they did this well. In the city "sanitary columns" were established, made up of small squads of officials representing the medical and engineering professions and the police; these visited every nook and corner of the town, and, having extraordinary powers for the emergency, compelled even the most dirty people to keep their premises clean. Excellent hospitals and laboratories were established, and of these I learned much from a former Cornell student who held an important position in one of them. Coming to town three or four times a week from my summer cottage in Finland, I was struck by the precautions on the Finnish and other railways: notices of what was to be done to prevent cholera and to meet it were posted, in six different languages; disinfectants were made easily accessible; the seats and hangings in the railway-cars were covered with leather cloth frequently washed with disinfectants; and to the main trains a hospital-car was attached, while a temporary hospital, well equipped, was established at each main station. In spite of this, the number of cholera patients at St. Petersburg in the middle of July rose to a very high figure, and the number of deaths each day from cholera was about one hundred. Of these victims the most eminent was Tschaikovsky, the composer, a man of genius and a most charming character, to whom Mr. Andrew Carnegie had introduced me at New York. One evening at a dinner-party he poured out a goblet of water from a decanter on the table, drank it down, and next day was dead from Asiatic cholera. But, with this exception, the patients were, so far as I learned, almost entirely from the peasant class. Although boiled water was supplied for drinking purposes, and some public-spirited individuals went so far as to set out samovars and the means of supplying hot tea to peasant workmen, the answer of one of the muzhiks, when told that he ought to drink boiled water, indicated the peasant view: "If God had wished us to drink hot water, he would have heated the Neva." CHAPTER XXXVI MY RECOLLECTIONS OF POBEDONOSTZEFF--1892-1894