sk of the
evening and say, in a voice broken with tears, 'My God! the Empress is
murdered,' and fly toward her home before we can utter a question--why,
it brings the giant event home to you, makes you a part of it and
personally interested; it is as if your neighbor, Antony, should come
flying and say, 'Caesar is butchered--the head of the world is fallen!'

"Of course there is no talk but of this. The mourning is universal and
genuine, the consternation is stupefying. The Austrian Empire is being
draped with black. Vienna will be a spectacle to see by next Saturday,
when the funeral cortege marches."

He was strongly moved by the tragedy, impelled to write concerning
it. He prepared the article which follows, but did not offer it for
publication, perhaps feeling that his own close association with the
court circles at the moment prohibited this personal utterance. There
appears no such reason for withholding its publication now.

A. B. P.

The more one thinks of the assassination, the more imposing and
tremendous the event becomes. The destruction of a city is a large
event, but it is one which repeats itself several times in a thousand
years; the destruction of a third part of a nation by plague and famine
is a large event, but it has happened several times in history; the
murder of a king is a large event, but it has been frequent.

The murder of an empress is the largest of all events. One must go back
about two thousand years to find an instance to put with this one. The
oldest family of unchallenged descent in Christendom lives in Rome and
traces its line back seventeen hundred years, but no member of it has
been present in the earth when an empress was murdered, until now. Many
a time during these seventeen centuries members of that family have
been startled with the news of extraordinary events--the destruction
of cities, the fall of thrones, the murder of kings, the wreck of
dynasties, the extinction of religions, the birth of new systems of
government; and their descendants have been by to hear of it and talk
about it when all these things were repeated once, twice, or a dozen
times--but to even that family has come news at last which is not staled
by use, has no duplicates in the long reach of its memory.

It is an event which confers a curious distinction upon every individual
now living in the world: he has stood alive and breathing in the
presence of an event such as has not fallen within the experi