Aunt Nina practically sacrificed her life to save that of the Empress, although the latter died years later at Petrograd, when, it is asserted, a luminous Cross appeared over the Winter Palace, typical of her physical and mental sufferings. It so happened that when the Empress and my aunt were driving in Switzerland, their carriage was run into by a cart, and, in order to prevent one of the shafts from striking the Empress, my aunt stood up to protect her, and was badly bruised in the chest. Some time afterwards cancer developed, but my aunt survived her Imperial mistress, and became Lady-in-Waiting to the Empress Dagmar, and Grande Maîtresse de la Cour to the Grand Duchess Elizabeth. The Grand Duchess was very much attached to her, and at her death she begged my grandmother to take her place. My grandmother, for family reasons, declined the honour, but she often used to visit the Grand Duchess and the Grand Duke Serge, and I remember hearing her describe the pathetic figure presented by the Grand Duchess after her husband’s assassination, when she had relinquished the splendours of life and had become a nun at Moscow. My childhood was chiefly passed on my grandmother’s estates. We led a somewhat patriarchal life at Revovka; a simple existence which will, I fear, never again return, and it is exceedingly difficult for me, as a Russian, to recognise the peasants of then and now. The average peasant was kindly by nature, entirely ignorant, and excessively difficult to educate. Whenever my grandmother tried to persuade her tenants to send their children to school, the answer was always the same: “Knowing how to read and write doesn’t provide food. Our parents got on very well without education, our sons can do likewise.” Their faith in the aristocratic class was boundless, they entirely depended on their landlords, but the Russian peasant has always, unfortunately for himself, been easily influenced by speeches and printed matter--hence the complete success of the Revolutionary Propaganda, and the belief in many of the false statements circulated in order to damage the Imperial family in the eyes of the people. I cannot defend our own attitude in not attempting to combat this danger; we were aware that it existed, but only one section, known as the Black Band, tried to destroy it by counter propaganda. Its efforts were unsuccessful, it received no support, for the very good reason that _nobody believed that the masses would rise_. The Russian aristocrat, secure in his class prejudices, and his optimistic faith in _himself_, was as loth as the French aristocrat of 1789 to realise that his position was, or could ever be, insecure!