therefore form an idea of the system of education to which Alexis was subjected, and perhaps one will feel indulgent in regard to the Empress when thinking of the perpetual dread and anxiety in which her days and nights were spent, and forgive her for the weakness which made her yield to every whim or caprice of the boy who seemed to have been born to add to her cup of sorrow, and not for the purpose of bringing joy into her life. I will now relate an incident which deeply impressed the Czarina at the time when it occurred. It was a few days before the birth of her son. We were at Peterhof and she was dressing for dinner. Suddenly we heard a crash behind us, and were dismayed to see that a heavy looking glass which hung upon the wall behind Alexandra Feodorovna had fallen to the floor, where it had been shattered into a thousand fragments. The Empress cried aloud in her emotion, and for one moment I believed that she was about to faint, so white did her features become. I applied myself to reassure her, but she would not be comforted, and declared that it was an ill omen and that probably she would die in childbirth. When everything was over, and on the day of the christening of the Grand Duke Alexis, I ventured to remind his mother of her fright of a few weeks before, and added that it was a clear proof how wrong it was to be superstitious, because certainly nothing happier could have occurred than the event which had just taken place, notwithstanding the bad omen of the broken looking glass. The Empress smiled sadly, and replied: “My good Marfa, we do not know yet what is going to befall my baby, and whether his will be a happy life or not. Perhaps the bad omen was for him and not for me.” A curious thing is that exactly ten years later, in July, 1914, just before the war, we were again at Peterhof, and the Czarina was dressing for dinner in the same room, when that identical looking glass, which had been rehung, fell with the same noise and just as unexpectedly, terrifying her as it had done before. Alas, alas, we could afford then to laugh at omens, but now that so many tragic things have occurred I wonder sometimes whether these accidents (for one can hardly call them anything else) were a kind of warning of the calamities about to follow. Certainly they could not fail to impress a woman as superstitious as the Empress grew in time to be.