me was:--

"And what has most impressed you, so far, on coming, as a new
experience, into my country?"

I was not prepared for the question, but answered at once and without
the least hesitation--for there seemed to come into my mind even as His
Majesty spoke, the vivid impression I had received--

"Russia's great spaces!"

"Ah, yes!" he said, evidently thinking very deeply; "that is true.
Russia's _great_ spaces--what a striking impression they must make, for
the first time!"

[Illustration: _Russia's Great Spaces--Winter._]

I went on to explain that one can see great spaces elsewhere. On the
ocean when for days together no other vessel is seen; on some of the
great plains in the other hemisphere; riding across the great Hungarian
tableland; and even in Central France or in the Landes to the west I
have felt this sense of space and distance; but Russia's great flat or
gently undulating expanses have always seemed to me to suggest other
spaces on beyond them still, and to give an impression of the vast
and illimitable, such as I have never known elsewhere. It is under this
impression of vast resources, no doubt, that so many military
correspondents of our daily papers constantly speak of the Russian
forces as "inexhaustible." It is the same with other things also. They
suggest such marvellous possibilities.

This is the impression I would like to give at once in this my opening
chapter--a sense of spaciousness--power to expand, to develop, to open
out, to make progress, to advance and grow. It is not the impression the
word "Russia" usually makes upon people who know little about her inner
life, and have received their ideas from those who have experienced the
repressive and restrictive side of her policy and administration. But I
can only give, and am glad of the opportunity, the results of my own
experiences and observations; and those are embodied in my reply to the
Emperor.

When I crossed the Russian frontier for the first time it was with a
very quaking and apprehensive spirit. All that lay beyond was full of
the mysterious and unknown, so entirely different, one felt it must be,
from all one's previous experiences of life! Anything might happen, for
this was Russia! "Russia" has stood so long with us in this country for
the repressive and reactionary, for the grim and forbidding and
restricting, that it will be difficult for many to part with those
ideas, and I can hardly hope to remove impressions no