AS DESPATCH-BEARER IN WAR-TIME- 1855 471 



rations in his speech, his tears betrayed him. Reforms 

 began at once halting, indeed, but all tending in the right 

 direction. How they were developed, and how so largely 

 brought to naught, the world knows by heart. Of all the 

 ghastly miscalculations ever made, of all the crimes which 

 have cost the earth most dear, his murder was the worst. 

 The murders of William of Orange, of Lincoln, of Gar- 

 field, of Carnot, of Humbert I, did not stop the course of 

 a beneficent evolution; but the murder of Alexander II 

 threw Russia back into the hands of a reaction worse than 

 any ever before known, which has now lasted nearly a 

 generation, and which bids fair to continue for many 

 more, unless the Russian reverses in the present war 

 force on a better order of things. For me, looking 

 back upon those days, it is hard to imagine even the 

 craziest of nihilists or anarchists wild enough to commit 

 such a crime against so attractive a man fully embarked 

 on so blessed a career. He, too, in the days of my stay, 

 was wont to mingle freely with his people ; he even went 

 to their places of public amusement, and he was fre 

 quently to be seen walking among them on the quays and 

 elsewhere. In my reminiscences of the Hague Conference, 

 I give from the lips of Prince Minister an account of a 

 conversation under such circumstances : the Czar walking 

 on the quay or resting on a seat by the roadside, while 

 planning to right a wrong done by a petty Russian official 

 to a German student. Therein appears not only a deep 

 sense of justice and humanity, but that melancholy, so 

 truly Russian, which was deepest in him and in his uncle, 

 the first Alexander. There dwell also in my memory 

 certain photographs of him in his last days, shown me 

 not long before his death, during my first official stay at 

 Berlin. His face was beautiful as of old, but the melan 

 choly had deepened, and the eyes made a fearful revela 

 tion ; for they were the eyes of a man who for years had 

 known himself to be hunted. As I looked at them there 

 came back to me the remembrance of the great, beautiful, 

 frightened eyes of a deer, hunted down and finally at my 



