A figure of mark at these Court functions was the Prussian Ambassador, Count Redern, who, with the help of his Countess and a very charming daughter, himself kept one of the pleasantest and best mounted houses in the town. His appointment to St. Petersburg was said to have been made for a unique reason. He had been named to one of the smallest European Courts. Now he possessed a service of silver plate of which he was passing proud, and it seemed to him to be utterly incongruous that its glory should be thrown away upon a very tiny Scandinavian capital. “Ich! Mit meiner Vaisselle!” he is said to have exclaimed with indignation when the appointment was notified to him. The objection was held to be unanswerable, so he and his service of plate were sent to cast lustre upon the capital of the Tsar. If, following upon Bismarck, he did not seem to be diplomatically an eagle, he was, at any rate, a great social success, and everybody liked him. It seems as if I had no story to write but what relates to feasts and splendour and the glory of the Emperor. I may have been monotonous. But all this magnificence cannot forbid the door to sorrow. Even yet my readers are like the Queen of Sheba, “the half was not told them.” But in this great stately home of the Tsars there is a chamber of grief, a corner which no man can penetrate without emotion; it is the reverse of a brilliant medal. One day I was taken by one of my friends about the Court to see the apartment which was occupied by the Emperor Nicholas. It was the eve of the anniversary of his death, just nine years ago. There was no magnificence, no luxury here; nothing but Spartan simplicity—the heroic simplicity of the man whom he took as his ideal, the Duke of Wellington—just two shabby little rooms on the ground floor of the Winter Palace, which elsewhere glittered with all the treasures of fairyland; the outer room was furnished with a wardrobe and decorated with a few drawings of fortifications. Here the mightiest ministers and generals waited for their audiences, which were granted in the Emperor’s sanctum—a room no bigger than the quarters of a subaltern in Chatham Barracks, which served as bedroom, dressing-room and study all in one. The furniture was to match; on the walls hung a few French prints, a portrait or two, and some bad sketches of reviews and sham fights; at the head of his bed the likeness of his beautiful and favourite daughter Olga, in the uniform of the regiment which he gave her. Books were represented by a collection of caricatures; a narrow camp bedstead, the mattress as hard as stone; spread upon the bed the military cloak which had served him—so it was said—for fifty years, a simple grey cloak with a red collar, no better than that of a common soldier; his tunic was out ready to put on, his casque and sword handy. His solitary brush and comb, his toothbrush and shaving tackle, were ready for use—it was as