She was undoubtedly one of the most beautiful women in Europe, and her husband was extraordinarily handsome; indeed, their beauty and their bearing made them the most distinguished couple at the great gathering of Royal personages I met at Buckingham Palace when the Jubilee of Queen Victoria was celebrated. After the terrible death of her husband, the Grand Duchess devoted herself to the education of the Grand Duke Paul’s motherless children, the Grand Duke Dmitri and the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, and, that task accomplished, she became a sister of charity. She has founded a convent in Moscow, where she follows a severe rule and devotes herself to hospital work and the care of the poor, realising that even a princess has no excuse to shirk the responsibilities of life and to lead a useless existence. How is it that there is such a marked difference between the tastes of the Emperor and those of his uncles and cousins? The answer is not difficult to find. The Emperor’s love of simplicity comes from his mother, the Empress Marie, who, now that she can indulge her own tastes, lives the greater part of the year with Queen Alexandra in a small villa on the Danish coast. When I visited them there I found that they were living as simply as private persons who know nothing of the life of Courts. But, while recognising the influence of his mother in the formation of the Emperor’s character, I like to think that something of the spirit of Peter the Great has been conserved in the Imperial family, and that the love of work, the courage, and the simplicity displaced by Nicholas II. are in some measure gifts from his great ancestor. One afternoon I drove out to the Islands in a troika, a sledge that might have come from Fairyland, covered with glistening trappings and luxurious furs and drawn by three horses abreast, and, on my way, I stopped to visit the little house in which Peter the Great lived when he was building his new capital. It is a tiny cottage, a mere hut, with two rooms. Nothing could be simpler or more unlike the vast Winter Palace. Yet I felt, as I left this humble abode, that the spirit of the man who was content to live in it still reigns in the splendid home of his descendant, the present Emperor.