Two letters are particularly significant. Pobyedonostsev could not have counseled the Emperor worse.

Play the Emperor! Remember you are the Autocrat. Speak to your Ministers as their Master. Do not be too good. Do not tell all the world that you bring disaster. Your angelic goodness, your forbearance, your patience, are well known, and everyone takes advantage of you. Make haste, my own darling; your little wife must always be behind you to spur you on.

Be like Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, the Emperor Paul. Crush them all. No, do not laugh, you naughty child. I so long to see you treat in this way those who try to govern you, when it is you who should govern them.

Could human folly have proposed a more destructive trio of tyrants as models to guide the feet of a monarch already stumbling in his ruin? Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, and the Emperor Paul!

Peter the Great who first started the Russian State on the wrong path, the typical despot who forced men to wear their clothes and shave their beards in a certain style because he so preferred it; the scorner of religion and the Church; regarded as Antichrist by his own people; the murderer who slew his own son Alexis because that unfortunate prince dared to defend the rights of his oppressed countrymen! Dimitri Merejkovski, in his remarkable psychological novel, Peter and Alexis, has left a vivid picture of this incident.

Lenin regarded Peter the Great as the first Bolshevik and declared that he was his political ancestor. Constantine Aksakov, brilliant Russian idealist, ardent lover of his people, and dreamer of a golden age for Russia, has left a characteristic indictment of the compulsory enlightenment inaugurated by Peter:

A man of genius and of bloodstained fame, you stand far off in the halo of terrible glory and armed with your axe. In the name of usefulness and science you have often dyed your hand in the blood of your people, and your swift thought told you that the seed of knowledge would swiftly grow when watered with blood. But wait! The spirit of the people has drawn back in the time of trouble, but it keeps its eternal right. It is waiting for the hour when a national voice will again call forth the waves of the people. You have despised all Russian life and in return a curse lies on your great work. You have discarded Moscow and, far from the people, you have built a solitary city which bears your name in a foreign tongue. But your feat is a wrong and the nation will rise again some day for ancient Moscow.

Prophetic words! To-day, two generations after Aksakov's death, Petrograd is a decaying, half-deserted city. Its very name has been changed to Leningrad, and the sceptre has returned to Moscow.

Ivan the Terrible the Russian Nero, who instituted a reign of terror against his own subjects that has passed into a proverb! 'He abandoned the palace in the Kremlin, and built himself and his satellites a whole new quarter in Moscow, summarily evicting the actual tenants; but he did not live much in the capital, preferring to direct his reign of terror from the forest of Alexandrov, which village he made his residence. Here he led the life of a lunatic, and forced his two sons, Ivan and Theodore, to do the same. The mornings were spent in bell-ringing and prostration; during dinner he read aloud the lives of the saints, in the afternoon he watched his victims being tortured, and in the evening he listened to soothsayers or got drunk. Everybody whom he suspected he had murdered, tortured, or imprisoned; these included his cousin and all his family, and many of the boyars and their

families. The Metropolitan of Moscow was outraged, imprisoned, and finally put to death for remonstrating with him. Not content with this, Ivan toured his unfortunate country, dealing death and destruction wherever he went. He literally devastated the prosperous city of Novgorod, and decimated its inhabitants, because it had dared to oppose his grandfather, and had rendered itself suspect of treachery. Finally, his suspicions fell on his own followers, and some of the chief oprichniki were executed. He made the people of Russia realize what it meant to invite a sovereign to come and rule upon his own terms. He did infinitely more material and moral harm to his country and to his subjects in twenty years than the Tatars had done in two hundred, and the irony of it was that he completely failed in his object.'

Among his victims was his own son, Ivan, whom he killed in a fit of rage in the presence of the victim's young wife, crushing his head with the heavy iron staff studded with iron points which the father was in the habit of carrying.

'Be like the Emperor Paul'! Now the Emperor Paul was known throughout Europe as the 'crowned madman,' whose despotism knew no bounds. So savage was his persecution, even of his own family, that a band of noblemen penetrated to his sleeping room on March 23, 1801, and murdered him. The Emperor had leaped from his bed at the sound of the approaching officers and hid behind some friendly curtain, but the leader of the band, touching the bedclothes, said, "The nest is warm the bird cannot be far away.' The members of the avenging group held the terrified despot while one of them calmly strangled him with the sash of his uniform. Among the murderers was the great-great-grandfather of Isvolsky, who served as Minister of

Driven finally to desperation by the futility of their efforts to curb the invisible influences and the dark forces surrounding the Empress, a small band of men of high birth, some related to the royal family, resolved to take the law of life and death into their own hands. The first victim marked for death was Rasputin. An intercepted letter revealed the fact that the Empress herself would have been the next to be removed.

The versions of Rasputin's death differ somewhat in details, but substantially they all agree that the 'prophet,' on the night of December 30, 1916, was enticed to the house of Prince Felix Yousoupov on the Moika, in Petrograd, and there assassinated in cold blood. Besides the Prince, the

conspirators included the Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich and Pourishkevich, leader of the right wing of the Duma. The body was bundled into a blanket; a dog was killed to explain the pistol shot and account for the blood; the body finally was conveyed to the Neva in the automobile of a very high personage, and pushed under the ice.

When the news spread through Russia that Rasputin was no more, men breathed freely, and hope mounted in their breasts. But the hope was shortlived. The domineering will of the Empress was unbroken, and a period of depression ensued. The Prince and the other nobles implicated in the taking off of Rasputin were banished, some to their estates in Russia and one to distant Persia. Practically all the members, near and distant, of the royal family united in beseeching the Emperor and the Empress to profit by the manifestations of popular unrest. Seventeen members of the royal family signed this protest. But the Tsarina was unmoved and the Tsar was obliged to request his own mother, the Dowager Empress, to leave the city and retire to her estates in the Crimea. The

Romanovs, like the Bourbons, learned nothing and forgot nothing. The Tsarina became more resentful, more bitter, more autocratic than ever.

Three weeks before the final debacle, in February 1917, a faint ray of hope flickered through the thickening gloom. But once more the invisible forces or was it the Tsarina?-intervened. Rodzianko narrates the incident:·

The Duma was in session for nearly a week. I learned casually that the Emperor had summoned several of the ministers, including Golitsyn, and expressed his desire to discuss the question of a responsible ministry. The conference ended in the Emperor's decision to go to the Duma next day and proclaim his will to grant a responsible ministry. Prince Golitsyn was overjoyed and came home in high spirits. That same evening he was again summoned to the Palace, where the Emperor announced to him his intention to leave for the Stavka.

'How is that, Your Majesty?' asked Golitsyn, amazed. 'What about a responsible ministry? You intended to go to the Duma to-morrow.'

'I have changed my mind. leaving for the Stavka to-night.'

Russia was doomed.

I am

THE evening of August 28 was very hot and windless, with light rain. Father G- and O called, and while we were talking a marine orderly brought a radio message from the weather bureau in San Juan saying that a hurricane was making up in Dominica.

"That's funny,' said Father G 'I just passed one of my old souls in the garden and she told me there was a bad gale making up in Dominica. How in the world did she know?'

'She smells it,' said O

Ellis said many of the Cha-Chas had beached their boats that day. He added that while the weather was threatening, the gale, if it made up, would probably shift its course before reaching us.

It rained all night very gently and softly, falling straight down and enclosing us as in a curtained airless room.

At 6 A.M. the phone rang. I heard Ellis talking to the harbor master, a Saba man and an old sailor. Ellis said: 'Falling barometer and a steady wind? Better hoist the first storm warning.'

It was a white morning of rain and clouds, but a light wind had come up, blowing out of the south. Low mists moved across the mountain tops. I leaned over the gallery rail looking into my drowned garden and saw, down at the Fort, a red flag with a black centre being limply hoisted.

I had to go down to the barracks to help the Colonel's widow pack for the next transport. The Colonel's quarters are on the sea side of the Fort, close to the water. I moved through the dim,

hot rooms with the feeling that my body was dissolving with heat.

No one spoke of the gale, so as not to disturb the poor woman any more than she already was. About noon I went on to the gallery to rest and smoke a cigarette. The harbor was as calm as if all the water in it were oil, but every now and then an almost invisible swell broke in a diffused sound on the rocks below. It was still raining.

From where I sat I could see the signal station at the entrance to the harbor, where approaching boats are signaled and where the storm flag was hoisted as well as over the Fort. Captain S stood in the doorway talking to me. As he talked the expression of his eyes changed, and, following his look, I saw a second flag being hoisted over the station. We went inside and found Captain Ctalking to the Colonel's widow. He was telling her that the marines would close up her quarters and she had better come to his house. When I left they were already banging at her hurricane windows. I ran along King's Wharf. Paymaster M- picked me

up in his Ford, which was in front of the Commissary. We went skidding up the wet hill to our quarters. Already the town had an air of panic. People were running, autos splashed past, doors were being banged. When I reached our door Eleanor waited me, dancing up and down.

'Are we going to have a hurricane? Are we going to have a hurricane?' she shouted.

Alfred was driving the iron bolts in the windows and doors to the east. I went out to the gallery and looked over the town. Denmark Hill, across from us, had a blind aspect; most of the hurricane doors and windows were already closed. As I stood there the cannon at the Fort gave the final signal-two shots in rapid succession, a pause, and then two more. In this harbor, walled like a room, it split the air, thundering back and forth.

Ellis came home. He said he had seen an old negro down by the Navy Building who had said to him: "You can't run away from God, sir, you can't run away from God.' To him it would be the voice of God speaking out of a whirlwind and he would not be afraid.

we

All afternoon, as I supervised the taking down of pictures and the stowing of silver and rugs in case should lose our roof, I tried to decide whether I was really afraid, or just enjoying the idea of being afraid. Pricklings and shudders, almost a physical cramp, passed through my nerves, but it was not really, taken in itself, a disagreeable sensation. After I had all the potted plants brought inside, had covered my piano with mattresses, sent out for laundry and provisions, for some sewing being done by a woman living in a flimsy shack, had all the iron bars and bolts driven in the twenty-eight windows and doors of the house, I was physically tired and it was nearly six o'clock.

There was very little change, apparently. It still rained, it still blew, but not with any unusual violence. The house was so close and swarming with mosquitoes we decided to get a breath of air in the car. Eleanor and I got in and Ellis drove us down Main Street toward the beach. Every door was bolted but that of the apothecary, and there people had gathered, looking

anxiously out and discussing possibilities. I noticed in the deserted street, bolted and barred, what beautiful mottled colors the walls were, washed and stained by the rain. The country outside the town was equally deserted; the road was even clear of pigs, fowls, and goats and goats these precious ones having

been gathered to safety.

At John Brewer's Bay enormous waves broke all up and down the coast. The sky seemed very close. Ellis got out to get our bath suits from the bathhouse, but when he tried to start the car again the engine was wet and it refused duty. For the first time the wind began to come in sharp gusts, quite violent and with a sort of terrifying rhythm. We finally got the car started and blew a tire. While Ellis laboriously changed it I felt myself growing intensely irritable. We were three miles from town and I had visions of carrying Eleanor to the Moravian Mission of Nisky, a mile away. But the tire was changed at last and we started for home.

The town was dark by now. We drove up to Father G's house, which was bolted. He came out, sat in our car a moment, and smoked a cigarette with us. I noticed his hands shook ever so little. In his house were eighteen of his oldest parishioners, — black, of course, black, of course, telling tales of former hurricanes. He said that about half an hour earlier a long level sun ray had come through the clouds and they had all given themselves up for lost. They said it was a sign. A woman wrapped in sacking, carrying a child, passed us on her way to the parish hall. All the hovels were being abandoned for the churches, Fort, and stronger buildings.

'What will happen to the ChaCha settlement on the North Shore?' asked Father G.

Ellis replied that the always faithful