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unrecognisable, and on the card was written the few but significant words: The Prisoner of Perm.' Later, I had to destroy this photograph, with many other letters and papers and precious documents. The Grand Duke wrote to thank us all warmly for our devotion to him, and invited us to come and spend the summer with them at Perm. I was overwhelmed with joy at the idea of this invitation, and not being able to wait a moment longer, began to prepare for this journey. Alas! the implacable fate that dogged my footsteps had decreed that I was never to see our beloved Grand Duke again.

One day we received a telegram from Johnson, stating that Nathalie Sergueyevna had left Perm, and was on her way back to St Petersburg. This telegram bewildered us. I could not think of any reason for her hasty departure. So again we were surrounded by mystery and anxiety, and awaited her arrival with impatience; then we learned the truth. Czecho-Slovakian troops were marching on Perm, and the town was in a state of unrest, bubbling with excitement, for the greater part of the inhabitants were hostile to the Communist rule. The Bolshevists grew alarmed at this, and began to make arrests. Nathalie went back to Gatchina, where I paid her numerous visits, and sometimes stayed with her for a few days. In that delightful house, where once all had been cheerful and full of joy, there was now the sorrow of desolation. The absence of the master was felt keenly. It seemed to us that his fate was becoming more uncertain. All his friends lived in constant anxiety, powerless to do anything, and the conditions grew worse as his dear letters became gradually fewer, until at last there was complete and absolute silence. Months went by in anxious waiting, without any hope of a brighter dawn. At last Nathalie was

prevailed upon to return to St Petersburg, because her house at Gatchina was to be commandeered by the Soviet, and then she was arrested and taken to the headquarters of the terrible Cheka. In spite of all that I could do, and the intercessions of her many friends, Nathalie Sergueyevna was kept prisoner for a month; but then was set at liberty, after which she managed to escape from the city under an assumed name. She passed as a Sister of Charity returning to

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her parents at Kiev; but she only stayed there a comparatively short time, and then went to Odessa, where she was taken on a British man-of-war and so to England.

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The last chapter of this tragic story is told by my friend, Mlle Baettig, who one day was sitting in her room in St Petersburg when she was told that a man wished to speak to her. To her surprise, she saw an elderly man, seemingly quite unknown, who saluted her with respect. Is it possible, Mademoiselle,' he said, 'that you do not know me?' And who are you?' she inquired. 'I am Basil Tchelichev, the Grand Duke's valet; I have managed to get back from Perm, where I have been imprisoned for six months. Fed only on putrid herrings' heads and a little black bread and tea, my health was in such a bad state that I thought I could never be able to come to St Petersburg. Barounov, the chauffeur, also was imprisoned with me since His Highness disappeared; but he had not the strength to attempt such a long and painful journey, and has remained in Perm.' So there before Mlle Baettig stood one of the last survivors of the drama, this faithful servant who had stayed with his master to the end. He continued:

'Our life went on in much the same fairly uneventful way in Perm, until one morning, very early, a Troika drove up and stopped outside our hotel. Five armed men got out; four of them were common soldiers, the fifth seemed to be the officer in charge. They came into the hotel and forced an entrance into the Grand Duke's room, saying they had come to arrest Michael Romanov. The Grand Duke hastily replied that he was ready to follow them, and begged that he might be allowed to dress in peace, whereupon the leader said that he would on no account leave the room, and that the Grand Duke could quite well dress himself whether he was there or not.

'Johnson, on hearing the conversation from the next room, came in and demanded on what authority this arrest was being made, for they were under the protection of the Soviet of Perm. He continued that he would never allow them to carry off the Grand Duke, that he would wake up the whole hotel and make such a great row about it, and, in fact, he did create such a disturbance that the five men became alarmed. Then the leader went to him and whispered

in his ear. The effect was magical. Johnson became at once reconciled, and begged His Highness to dress himself as quickly as possible, and, turning to Basil Tchelichev, who was helping his master, said: "All is well, Basil,'at last all is well for us now. I am so thankful.”

'Johnson whispered to the Grand Duke what the leader of the band of soldiers had said. Basil had not been able to hear distinctly, but he gathered that these soldiers were friends of His Highness, disguised as Bolshevists of the Red Army, who had come to save him. The Grand Duke did not believe this, and smiled sadly at the joy and relief of his friend. He dressed without a word, and as soon as he was ready, they entered the waiting Troika. In the front seat sat the Grand Duke, Johnson, and the leader; behind were the four soldiers. As they drove away, Johnson waved his hand, elated and in the best of spirits, an absolute contrast to His Highness, who waved his last good-bye with a sorrowful smile. He seemed aware of the doom that awaited them.

'Then they disappeared and nothing has been heard of them since.'

OLGA POUTIATINE.

P.S.-A 'Times' Correspondent, writing from Riga on March 24, 1925, reported the death in an aeroplane accident of three high Soviet officials, one of whom was Miasnikoff, 'who carried out various commissions of a most responsible and often most repulsive nature,' including the murder of the Grand Duke Michael.

'Miasnikoff conducted the Grand Duke and Johnson in two motor-cars in an eastward direction, but halted in a forest, where he personally shot Michael, and his attendants murdered Johnson. They had prepared a heap of dry brushwood soaked in petrol and burnt the bodies. Later Miasnikoff fell into temporary disgrace because he headed a so-called Labour opposition against the orthodox Leninists, but after a reconciliation he was restored to his high position.'

SOME RECENT BOOKS.

Coleridge-Transitions in Literature-Stella Benson-Sea and Jungle-Roman Britain-Miracles of the VirginPetra, Egypt, and Maeterlinck-Elizabeth and the lyrics of her age-The English Pope-Bibles-Mr Yeats-The Red Terror.

It is easy to believe that in her generous desire to champion a personality, somewhat battered, although possessed of genius and some undeniable charm, Mrs Watson should paint Coleridge in rosier, kindlier colours than he deserved; for poor S. T. C. was pummelled sufficiently by the vicissitudes of life and the critics who came afterwards, to justify the feeling that a little exaggeration on the other side would be only fair-play. The mere fact of his enjoying the hospitality of Dr and Mrs Gillman at Highgate for over eighteen years, while living apart from his wife and family, was enough to invite too many unkindnesses of thought and word. Mrs Watson is the granddaughter of the Gillmans. From her grandmother, who died in 1860, she heard much to the credit of the poet-philosopher, and inherited a number of documents, letters, and fragments of notes, which support the view that Coleridge was not the selfindulgent idler and driveller that generally he had seemed. 'Coleridge at Highgate' (Longmans) is, undoubtedly and naturally, a partial volume; but it explains a few circumstances which may well be accepted. The opium-taking was a necessity due to severe rheumatic agony; in his household ways he was considerate, unselfish, helpful; he endeavoured to work, and did work, more than some of his critics believed. He was not in those days quite the man of shining thought and guidance which Mrs Watson suggests, for his ponderousness grew sometimes terrible, he often lost his way along futile philosophical by-roads, and he could easily forget his good purpose in a verbose dream. Yet is there among our outstanding poets and thinkers-a congress to which S. T. Coleridge rightly belongs—a more pathetic figure than he-helpless often, yet ever well-meaning? For that reason it is well that this gallant and gracious volume should have been written.

Let us confess that in the beginning we felt that Miss M. P. Willcocks, in laying the foundations of her ambitious scheme of 'Between the Old Worlds and the New' (Allen and Unwin), was projecting an unwieldy structure, for she made occasional assumptions which rather begged the question, being, to use her own words, 'lost in the desire to express a vast incomprehensible unity.' Yet soon the excellence of her spirit and argument prevailed, and having regard to the book as a whole, it is to be recognised as a sincere endeavour to realise leading tendencies during a great literary age. Beginning with the impulse to which Goethe, Balzac, and Shelley gave expression in their diverse ways, she proceeds to study the Victorian mind through the works and personalities of Carlyle, George Eliot, Thackeray, Trollope, Dickens, and Tennyson. Browning, the Brontës, and Meredith are regarded by her as rather passengers than producers of the spirit of their times; but there followed the 'wreckers,' Ibsen, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Tchehov, with Anatole France; and, lastly, the doubtful

builders' of whom the greatest was Dostoevsky. On the whole, Miss Willcocks makes out a good case, but her judgments are often doubtful, as in the assertion that Byron 'had to be raised out of his grave by industrious journalists at the time of his centenary,' for with authority we can declare that never was there a more spontaneous celebration than that of April 1924. It is rather in the larger ways that her natural bias intervenes. To Thackeray she is unfair, as there is far more in his works than gilded snobbery. While Dickens she represents as too kind to be a true picture. Neither of these men is to be judged by his writings alone; and in his heart as in his life Thackeray assuredly was the finer.

The fiction fantasies of Miss Stella Benson are not for everybody, as half the world likes its humour to be as plain and unsubtle as the dome of St Paul's on a frosty morning; but it will be a sad, even a sour, mind that cannot extract joy of the most delicious quality from her book of traveller's impressions, The Little World' (Macmillan), in which she has gathered glimpses of man in his importance from the United States to China and Japan. She notices humanity at odd moments, often

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