from the beginning, much
mystified. The dining-room was quite a luxurious apartment, so was the
"saint's" study--a den with a soft Eastern carpet, a big writing-table, a
high porcelain stove of chocolate and white, and silk-upholstered
settees. From this den a door opened into the "holy" man's
sleeping-room, an apartment of spartan plainness save for its big stove,
a replica of the one in the study.

The household, I found, consisted of one other person, an old Siberian
peasant woman of about sixty, named Anna, who came from Pokrovsky, the
"saint's" native village. She acted as housekeeper and maid-of-all-work.

That first morning spent with Rasputin was full of interest. He was a
dirty, uncouth, illiterate fellow who repelled me. His hands were hard,
his fingers knotty, his face was of a distinctly criminal type, and yet
in my bewilderment I remembered that General Kouropatkine had declared
him to be sent by the Almighty as the Protector of Russia.

His conversation was coarse and overbearing, and interlarded by
quotations from Holy Writ. He mentioned to me certain ladies in high
society, and related, with a broad grin upon his saintly countenance,
scandal after scandal till I stood aghast.

Truly the "saint" was a most remarkable personality. From the first I had
been compelled to admit that whatever the Russian public had said, there
was a certain amount of basis for the gossip. His was the most weird and
compelling personality that I had ever met. Even Stolypin had been
impressed by him, though the Holy Synod had declared him to be a fraud.

My work consisted of reading to him and replying to letters from hundreds
of women who had become attracted by his peculiar distorted emotional
religion, many of whom desired to enter the cult which he had
established. As secretary it was also my duty to arrange for the weekly
reunions of the "sister-disciples," held in a big bare upstairs room, in
which hung a holy ikon and several sacred pictures, and in which the
mysteries of his "religion" were practised.

Ere long, I found that to those weekly seances there flocked many of the
wealthiest and most cultured women in Petrograd, who actually held the
ex-horse-stealer in veneration, and believed, as the peasants believed,
that he could work miracles.

One afternoon, after I had been nearly a month in Rasputin's service,
Boris Stuermer, a well-known Court sycophant, with bristling hair and a
sweeping goatee beard, was bro