It is now already six months since I am here, living in a kind of nightmare. I do not know to this day whether the “Blessed” Gricha is a saint or the greatest sinner the earth has ever known. I cannot find a quiet place in this miserable village. I would like to run away, to return to St. Petersburg, but I dare not do so. I am so afraid, so terribly afraid of the “Blessed” one. His large, grey, piercing eyes crush me, enter into my very soul and absolutely terrify me. At a distance of 5,000 versts I feel his presence near me. I feel that he has got extraordinary powers, that he can do everything that he wishes with me. For two whole years Rasputin was not allowed to show himself in the Russian capital, but the influential friends he had there never left off trying to get the decree of banishment rescinded. Among others, the Archbishop of Saratoff, Hermogene, and Illiodore worked most actively in his favour, and the latter in one of his sermons did not hesitate to call Rasputin the “greatest saint which the modern Russian Church had ever known.” At last the efforts of his friends proved successful and Rasputin, toward the end of the year 1912, reappeared in St. Petersburg, where this time his progress was far more rapid than it had been formerly, and here his reputation of a latter-day saint grew with every hour, until at last he came to be looked upon as a real manifestation of the Divinity upon earth. It was about that time that he was seen more frequently at Tsarskoie Selo, where the poor Empress was eating her heart away in anxiety over the health of her only son, the little heir to the throne, whose days seemed to be numbered. Rasputin, who had been introduced to her as a pious, good man, whose prayers had already worked miracles, was very quickly able to influence her in the sense that he persuaded her that the small Grand Duke could only be cured if constant prayers were said for him by people who were agreeable to the Lord. It is not to be denied that the pseudo-saint had cultivated to a considerable extent the science of hypnotism and that he used it in regard to the consort of the sovereign in the sense that she grew really to believe that the presence of the “Prophet” by the side of her sick child might cure the latter. There was nothing else in their relations to each other, which remained always, in spite of all that has been said, purely official ones.