“I was at my country house, and was not a little surprised on hearing that a messenger from the council of state wished to see me. The case and letter were introduced, the former of which contained a large packet from Dr. Franklin, and the letter a very complimentary communication on the part of the Duke of Sudermania. These despatches,” says the princess, “were sent without any examination,” and it was necessary to explain their nature at once to the despotic Catherine. “Accordingly I drove to town,” adds the princess, “or rather straight to court; and on entering the Empress’s dressing-room I told the _valet de chambre_ in waiting that if her majesty was not then engaged I should be happy in having permission to speak to her, and to show her some papers which I had that morning received. The Empress desired I might be shown into her bed-chamber, where I found her writing at a little table. Having delivered into her hands the letter of the Duke of Sudermania, ‘These others, madame,’ said I, ‘are from Dr. Franklin and from the secretary of the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, of which I have been admitted a most unworthy member.’” The Empress made no comment on this matter; but after reading the letter of the duke, desired the princess not to answer his grace’s complimentary effusion. She had no objection, it appears, to a correspondence between the princess and the octogenarian Franklin, on the other side of the sea; but with the Duke of Sudermania it was quite a different affair. The duke was a brother of the King of Sweden, there was a coolness between the courts of Russia and Sweden, and, to complicate matters, his grace had admired the princess at Aix and Spa, who, with all her vast experience of life and long years of widowhood, was only a little over forty, and speaks herself of her _beaux yeux_. From the time of the election of the Princess Daschkof, in 1789, the society has always had a Russian membership, generally from among the members of the St. Petersburg Academy. In 1864 it was presented with a superb copy of the Codex Sinaiticus, published in St. Petersburg in 1862, from the parchment rolls found by Tischendorf in the monastery of St. Catharine on Mount Sinai. A day never to be forgotten by the members of the Philosophical Society--and there are some persons living whose memory runs back to that period--was that upon which the Marquis de Lafayette was welcomed to its hall, on his return to America in 1824. No words can more fitly describe the emotions of the hour, certainly none can bring back more perfectly the aroma of that olden time adulation, than the address of welcome pronounced, on this occasion, by Mr. Charles J. Ingersoll: