Sometime later, meeting Pobedonostzeff, I asked him which of these stories was correct. He answered immediately, "Neither: in the discharge of my duties I saw the Archbishop Isidore constantly down to the last hours of his life, and no such event ever occurred. He was never paralyzed and never blind." But the great statesman and churchman then went on to say that, although this story was untrue, there were a multitude of others quite as remarkable in which he believed; and he gave me a number of legends showing that Father Ivan possessed supernatural knowledge and miraculous powers. These he unfolded to me with much detail, and with such an accent of conviction that we seemed surrounded by a mediaeval atmosphere in which signs and wonders were the most natural things in the world. As to his action on politics since my leaving Russia, the power which he exercised over Alexander III has evidently been continued during the reign of the young Nicholas II. In spite of his eighty years, he seems to be, to-day, the leader of the reactionary party. During the early weeks of The Hague Conference, Count Munster, in his frequent diatribes against its whole purpose, and especially against arbitration, was wont to insist that the whole thing was a scheme prepared by Pobedonostzeff to embarrass Germany; that, as Russia was always wretchedly unready with her army, The Hague Conference was simply a trick for gaining time against her rivals who kept up better military preparations. There may have been truth in part of this assertion; but the motive of the great Russian statesman in favoring the conference was probably not so much to gain time for the army as to gain money for the church. With his intense desire to increase the stipends of the Russian orthodox clergy, and thus to raise them somewhat above their present low condition, he must have groaned over the enormous sums spent by his government in the frequent changes in almost every item of expenditure for its vast army--changes made in times of profound peace, simply to show that Russia was keeping her army abreast of those of her sister nations. Hence came the expressed Russian desire to "keep people from inventing things." It has always seemed to me that, while the idea underlying the Peace Conference came originally from Jean de Bloch, there must have been powerful aid from Pobedonostzeff. So much of good--and, indeed, of great good--we may attribute to him as highly probable, if not certain.