forth as from a great organ, and blend marvellously with the clear, soft, gentle notes of the red-robed chorister boys in front of the Iconostase.  Listening with intense emotion, I involuntarily recall to mind Fra Angelico’s pictures of angelic choirs, and cannot help thinking that the pious old Florentine, whose soul was attuned to all that was sacred and beautiful, must have heard in imagination such music as this.  So strong is the impression that the subsequent details of the long ceremony, including the anointing with the holy chrism, fail to engrave themselves on my memory.  One incident, however, remains; and if it had happened in an earlier and more superstitious age it would 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!”