uld
doubtless have been chronicled as an omen full of significance. As the
Emperor is on the point of descending from the dais, duly crowned and
anointed, a staggering ray of sunshine steals through one of the narrow
upper windows and, traversing the dimly lit edifice, falls full on the
Imperial crown, lighting up for a moment the great mass of diamonds with
a hundredfold brilliance.

In a detailed account of the Coronation which I wrote on leaving the
Kremlin, I find the following: "The magnificent ceremony is at an end,
and now Nicholas II. is the crowned Emperor and anointed Autocrat of all
the Russias. May the cares of Empire rest lightly on him! That must be
the earnest prayer of every loyal subject and every sincere well-wisher,
for of all living mortals he is perhaps the one who has been
entrusted by Providence with the greatest power and the greatest
responsibilities." In writing those words I did not foresee how heavy
his responsibilities would one day weigh upon him, when his Empire would
be sorely tried, by foreign war and internal discontent.

One more of these old Moscow reminiscences, and I have done. A day or
two after the Coronation I saw the Khodinskoye Polye, a great plain in
the outskirts of Moscow, strewn with hundreds of corpses! During
the previous night enormous crowds from the city and the surrounding
districts had collected here in order to receive at sunrise, by the
Tsar's command, a little memento of the coronation ceremony, in the
form of a packet containing a metal cup and a few eatables; and as day
dawned, in their anxiety to get near the row of booths from which the
distribution was to be made, about two thousand had been crushed to
death. It was a sight more horrible than a battlefield, because among
the dead were a large proportion of women and children, terribly
mutilated in the struggle. Altogether, "a sight to shudder at, not to
see!"

To return to the remark of my friend in the Kremlin on Easter Eve,
the Russians in general, and the Muscovites in particular, as the
quintessence of all that is Russian, are certainly a religious people,
but their piety sometimes finds modes of expression which rather
shock the Protestant mind. As an instance of these, I may mention the
domiciliary visits of the Iberian Madonna. This celebrated Icon, for
reasons which I have never heard satisfactorily explained, is held
in peculiar veneration by the Muscovites, and occupies in popular
estimation a p