I remember him so well on that August afternoon, facing the multitude assembled to greet him as its Czar and leader, and I remember, too, the thought which swept through my mind, that it was a thousand pities it was not his father who stood there in his place. Alexander III. would have known how to address Russia in an hour of national danger. He was neither a brilliant nor an extremely intelligent man, but he was a man and a Sovereign, who realized the duties of a Monarch and of a man. He was, moreover, a Russian who thought and who felt as a Russian alone could think and feel, in questions where the honor and the future of the country were involved. Nicholas II. was simply an Emperor who wished to be an autocrat. It was too much and not enough at the same time, and many among those who looked upon him, as he appeared before his people on that historical balcony whence it was the custom to announce to the population of the capital the death of a Sovereign whenever it took place, many wondered whether they were not going to hear that another one had started on the long journey whence there is no return. His presence seemed to herald a funeral rather than the hope of a triumph, and this impression which he produced was so vivid that more than one acknowledged having experienced it when talking about this famous day which, though we knew it not, proved to be the last upon which a Russian Czar faced the Russian people before the latter overthrew the chief of the House of Romanoff from the Throne which he had disgraced. XIX MY FATHERLAND, MUST I FORSAKE THEE? It would not have been human on the part of the Empress Alexandra if she had not felt deeply aggrieved at the war which had so unexpectedly broken out between the country of her birth and that of her adoption. She had never really become a Russian at heart and her sympathies had remained exclusively German all through her married life. Apart from this, she had experienced from the intercourse which she had kept up with her own family the only pleasure which she had frankly enjoyed since the Crown of the Russian Czarinas had been put upon her head. She dearly loved her two sisters, the Princess Victoria of Battenberg and the Princess Irene of Prussia, far more, indeed, than she did her other one, the Grand-Duchess Elisabeth, whom she considered more or less as a rival and whom in the secret of her heart she could not forgive for having won in Russia a popularity which had always been denied to her own self.