I have often been asked what the Czarina used to do with her days and whether it was true that she spent them in absolute idleness. And just as often I have wondered what could have given rise to such an opinion. The Empress was, on the contrary, one of those industrious women whose hands are never at rest, and who require to be always occupied in some way or another, either mentally or with some manual work which keeps their attention concentrated on its intricacies. At Darmstadt the Princesses were trained to make their own clothes and to wait upon themselves, and one of the great pleasures of my mistress was to embroider, cut, and make the different objects composing the layette and the wardrobe of her children. As I have already related, she had tried to arrange in Czarskoi Selo a Needlework Guild, but she did not meet with any enthusiastic response to her efforts in that direction. Nevertheless, until she left it, there was in the Palace where she had made her home a room set apart for the use of the ladies who used to come and work on certain days and hours on clothes for the poor which were distributed to the indigent of Czarskoi Selo and St. Petersburg at Christmas time. When the Japanese war occurred, a regular working room was established in the Winter Palace and never closed, because it became the centre of the Empress’s activity in the way of making garments for the poor. No Sovereign had ever thought of anything of the kind in Russia, and of course the action of Alexandra Feodorovna in that respect was discussed far and wide, and whilst many people applauded her for the initiative she had taken, others thought it was not dignified for a Russian Empress to cut flannels and knit stockings, even for the poor. They would have liked her to depend for her charities on other people, as her predecessors had done. In fact, in this as in so many other things, she was ignoring the traditions which governed all that went on in the Palaces of the Czars, and of course this was resented. But the poor population of the capital learnt to bless the Empress’s name, and for a time was grateful to her, until the days of the first Revolution, when everything that was connected with her became tinged with that unpopularity which had become attached to her name.