After despatching my last message, which I had the utmost difficulty in doing owing to the frantic mass of newspaper correspondents of all nationalities struggling desperately into and out of the Telegraph Office, I had the good fortune to meet Baron von Marschall, the amiable and accomplished Foreign Secretary, who favoured me with a brief conversation on the momentous subject of the hour. Yes, he said, it was unfortunately quite true that the Russians were rapidly concentrating their forces towards the Austro-German frontier, and that a sotnia of prying Cossacks, coming from Tarnogrod, had even pushed forward on the Austrian side of the border towards Jaroslav, an important railway junction point in Galicia. He had just received intelligence to this effect from Prince Reuss, the German Ambassador in Vienna, who added that things indeed looked their very worst. ‘But this,’ I remarked, ‘is an act of invasion on the part of Russia, is it not, and means war?’ The Baron shook his head ominously, and, with a kindly ‘come and see me again to-morrow morning,’ squeezed my hand and hurried off to see Count Syéchényi at the Austrian Embassy, which stands over against the former home of M. Benedetti, with all its associations connected with the beginning of Germany’s last great war. On my way back to the Telegraph Office, where I write this, I encountered, just at the entrance to the Russian Embassy, Unter den Linden, its genial and honest occupant, Count Schouvaloff, who was good enough to return my greeting by motioning me to stop, and telling me that he had just been to see Count Caprivi, and assure him, on the part of his Imperial master, that all these warlike preparations in Western Poland implied no menace whatever to Germany, with whom Russia had not the least cause of quarrel, but that, nevertheless, so long as Austria threatened to derange the balance of power in the Balkan Peninsula for her own selfish ends, Russia would be incriminating herself in the eyes of history if she stood by with folded hands and sought not to safeguard her most vital interests by all the means at her disposal. And as Pitt had created a new world to redress the balance of the old, so Russia was now compelled to re-establish equilibrium in one part of the Eastern Continent of Europe by giving the would-be disturber of this equilibrium work enough to engross all his attention in another. ‘These were not, of course, the very words,’ added the Count, ‘which I used to the Chancellor, but they express the exact sense of my communication.’ MIDNIGHT.