of duty. "I have seen this young man, with his
pathetically earnest face, grow up." he said. "When the time
was ripe he was made a member of the Imperial Council, a
sort of bureaucratic parliament in which the ministers of
the empire and the various higher officials and privy
councilors debate the measures which it is proposed to
introduce. In this assembly the young heir apparent early
manifested a quiet tact and wisdom which showed him to be a
born ruler of men."

"Nothing Disconcerts Him."

Dr. Dillon, the St. Petersburg correspondent of the London _Daily
Telegraph_, who visited the United States last summer to report the
proceedings of the Portsmouth peace conference, telegraphed to his paper
immediately after "Bloody Sunday" in January of last year:

If the emperor has changed his place of residence several
times of late, he acted solely out of consideration for
others, not from any sense of personal insecurity. It is
only fair to him to say that he is absolutely calm and
unmoved as he was after the intelligence had arrived that
ninety thousand men had been wounded or killed on the Sha
River.

Nothing disconcerts his majesty. A person who has spoken
with him several times during the eventful days of this week
assures me that he was less concerned, less preoccupied, on
Sunday and Monday than was General Grant or Von Moltke
before one of their critical engagements.

Just before signing to-day's ukase abolishing civil powers
and administration and appointing Trepoff governor-general,
his majesty was whistling a lively air in his apartments in
the palace.

As Seen by Two American Business Men.

One of New York's foremost men of affairs, Charles R. Flint, who visited
Russia last spring with a view to making an inquiry into the industrial
possibilities of the country, was thus quoted in the _Herald_ on his
return in June last:

The emperor impressed me as a man of extraordinarily quick
perception and of broad intelligence. His memory also is
marvelous, which I believe is a characteristic of the
Romanoffs. It was just after it had become generally known
in St. Petersburg that the Czar had taken an unalterable
stand on the question of indemnity, and while the issue of
peace or the continuation of the war was hanging in the
balance, that I was accorded an interview with him. I may