The project against Constantinople was a scheme of conquest continually to be delayed, but never discarded, and, happen what might, it was never to be endured that the prospect of Russia’s attaining some day to the Bosphorus should be shut out by the ambition of any other Power. Nicholas was quite aware that multitudes of the pious throughout his vast dominions dwelt upon the thought of their co-religionists under the Turkish rule, and looked to the shining cross of St. Sophia, symbol of their faith above the church founded by Constantine, as the goal of political unity for a “suppliant nation.” And Kinglake tells us with an almost acid irony of Louis Napoleon, that he who was by the Senatus-Consulte of 1804 the statutory heir of the great Bonaparte, and after his exile and imprisonment had returned to France, laboured to show all men “how beautifully Nature in her infinite wisdom had adapted that same France to the service of the Bonapartes; and how, without the fostering care of these same Bonapartes, the creature was doomed to degenerate, and to perish out of the world, and was considering how it was possible at the beginning of the nineteenth century to make the coarse Bonaparte yoke of 1804 sit kindly upon her neck.” The day was drawing near when a great war would seem to him to offer just the opportunity he wanted. Far away as yet was that awful massacre of peaceful citizens in Paris in 1851, with which the name of Louis Napoleon was associated as responsible for the _coup d’état_—a massacre probably the result of brutal panic on the part of the soldiers, the civilians, and that craven president, Louis Napoleon himself, whose conscience made a coward of him, and whose terror usually took the form of brutality—but long before that date, by his callous plotting and underhand self-seeking, he was preparing forces which then made for death and terror, and by that time had more or less broken the manhood of his beautiful Paris. Yet all over the world at all times, while the enemy is sowing tares in the field, the good seed is ripening also in the ground for the harvest; and through these same years far-off threads were being woven, ready to make part of the warp and woof of a life, as yet busied with the duties and joys of childhood, but one day to thrill the hearts of Europe and be remembered while time shall last. Elizabeth Fry, who was to be one of its decisive influences, was bringing new light and hope into the noisome prisons of a bygone century, and we shall see how her life-work was not without its influence later on the life of the child growing up at Embley and Lea Hurst.