eets of Petrograd on their way to execution. They were seated in
chairs on large tumbrils, with their backs to the horses. Each one had
a placard on his, or her breast, inscribed "Regicide" ("Tsaryubeeyetz"
in Russian). Two military brass bands, playing loudly, followed the
tumbrils. This was to make it impossible for the condemned persons to
address the crowd, but the music might have been selected more
carefully. One band played the well-known march from Fatinitza. There
was a ghastly incongruity between the merry strains of this captivating
march and the terrible fate that awaited the people escorted by the
band at the end of their last drive on earth. When the first band
rested, the second replaced it instantly to avoid any possibilities of
a speech. The second band seemed to me to have made an equally unhappy
selection of music. "Kaiser Alexander," written as a complimentary
tribute to the murdered Emperor by a German composer, is a spirited and
tuneful march, but as "Kaiser Alexander" was dead, and had been killed
by the very people who were now going to expiate their crime, the
familiar tune jarred horribly. A jaunty, lively march tune, and death
at the end of it, and in a sense at the beginning of it too. At times
even now I can conjure up a vision of the broad, sombre Petrograd
streets, with the dull cotton-wool sky pressing down almost on to the
house-tops; the vast silent crowds thronging the thoroughfares, and the
tumbrils rolling slowly forward through the crowded streets to the
place of execution, accompanied by the gay strains of the march from
Fatinitza. The hideous incongruity between the tune and the occasion
made one positively shudder.

There is in the Russian temperament a peculiar unbalanced hysterical
element. This, joined to a distinct bent towards the mystic, and to a
large amount of credulity, has made Russia for two hundred years the
happy hunting-ground of charlatans and impostors of various sorts
claiming supernatural powers: clairvoyants, mediums, yogis, and all the
rest of the tribe who batten on human weaknesses, and the perpetual
desire to tear away the veil from the Unseen. It so happened that my
chief at Lisbon had in his youth dabbled in the Black Art. Sir Charles
Wyke was a dear old man, who had spent most of his Diplomatic career in
Mexico and the South American Republics. He spoke Spanish better than
any other Englishman I ever knew, with the one exception of Sir William
Barrington