oyal car besides rooms for the
attendants. The most remarkable thing about this car is the dais and
divan at one end of the salon. No one may sit on this raised divan but
the King or the Queen. A drapery of silk velvet forms the background.
Above the back of the divan the royal arms are carved. Probably it
diverts his Majesty's mind to sit here on high now and then while
journeying and call his ministers around him and ask them questions and
make wise comments, as Kings always do--in certain books.

Downright worry drove Czar Alexander III. of Russia to his death. Taller
and stronger than any of his subjects, not one of whom could cope with
him in wrestling, this imperial giant was actually tormented into his
grave by fears of nihilistic plots to destroy him. Nowhere was this fear
greater than when on railroad journeys. Again and again Alexander
abandoned long trips at the last moment because the nihilists had
learned his plans, and there was reason to believe that they had dug
mines under the railroad track and were ready to blow him and his train
to fragments. His son has not been on the throne long enough, the
nihilists say, for them to decide whether or not they shall try to kill
him.

Alexander's train was a fort on wheels. It was built in 1889, two years
after a terrible underground explosion of dynamite, which wrecked the
Czar's train at Borki, when he was on his way from the Crimea to St.
Petersburg with the Empress and their family. In that accident
twenty-one persons were killed and thirty-six were wounded, but not one
of the imperial family was injured. The Czar showed himself a brave man
by going to the aid of the wounded as soon as he could climb out of the
wreck. All the cars in the train were of wood.

The new train of 1889 was made of wood too, but the cars were armored.
The outside of each car was of heavy iron, inside of which was a layer
of eight inches of cork. All of the four cars in the train were exactly
alike outwardly, so that a nihilist would find it hard to pick out the
Czar's car should he by any accident get within shooting distance. When
the Czar travelled he often spent his time in a car that was so built
and painted as to look like a baggage-car from the outside. When the
Czar visited Emperor William III., at Berlin, in October, 1889, six
Russian workmen put gratings of wrought-iron at the tops and bottoms of
all the chimneys of the old Schloss and palace at Potsdam, which the
Czar occ