Another Russian Mission-Irish Stew in St. Petersburg-The Ill-conditioned Courier Again-The Earl of Dufferin and Lord Frederick Hamilton-A Recognition at the Beefsteak Club-An Inopportune Attack of LumbagoYod-Lying-in-State of Alexander II.-A Memorial Service.

I CAME home in the spring; and I do not find that anything of sufficient importance to merit record here occurred during the year 1880. It was different in 1881. One Sunday, in the second week in March, I was present at a dinner-party given by the Earl of Fife, who then lived in Cavendish Square. Prince Lobanoff, the Russian Ambassador, was to have been one of the guests; but his Excellency was detained at the Embassy by affairs of a gravely serious nature. Early in the afternoon Lord Fife received a telegram from Chesham House stating that an attempt had been made on the life of the Emperor Alexander II. at St. Petersburg; and that his Majesty was grievously wounded. The first course of the dinner had not concluded when another despatch arrived from Belgrave Square saying that the Tsar was dead. Naturally this terrible tragedy formed the principal subject of conversation throughout the evening; but I myself was for personal reasons uneasily preoccupied by the shocking catastrophe at St. Petersburg. I reflected ruefully

that, in all human probability, ere many hours were over I should be on my way towards the snow-clad plains of Russia. I dreaded lest a messenger from the office should be waiting for me on my return home with instructions for me to proceed "Due North" by Monday morning's express from Charing Cross. I dreaded that messenger as much as the naughty boy dreads the advent of the schoolmaster.

I thought that at least I would tire the juvenile Mercury from Fleet Street well out. It was nearly midnight when the party at Lord Fife's broke up; and I wandered from club to club till three in the morning. No messenger had been in quest of me, so I learned when I returned to Mecklenburgh Square; and my wife did not even know of the horrible crime which had been perpetrated at St. Petersburg. Of course the morning's papers were full of news about the latest Nihilist atrocity, but it was a private and not a public communication which I was nervously awaiting. The communication arrived, sure enough, just before lunch; it came from Mr. Le Sage, the managing editor of the Daily Telegraph, and was to this effect:-"Please write a leading article on the price of fish at Billingsgate, and go to St. Petersburg in the evening." My duty was before me, and I had to do it; and my wife understood quite as well as I did what course of action to adopt under the circumstances. I merely said: "Office; passport; money," lighted a cigar, and went to work on the fish leader. By four o'clock she had returned with

my Foreign Office passport, viséd by the Russian Ambassador; with a letter of credit, and a large supply of rugs and fleecy hosiery. I had no fur pelisse ; but I thought that I could easily buy one so soon as I arrived in the Russian capital; and that meanwhile a great-coat of stout beaver, wadded and lined with quilted silk, would keep out the cold well enough.

So I hastened, if not like an arrow from a "Tartar's bow," as directly and expeditiously as a Channel steamer and express trains would carry me, through Brussels and Cologne, and Berlin and Königsberg, to Petropolis. It was an exceptionally cold winter; but Russian railway compartments are rather over- than under-heated; and I suffered little from the cold until I found myself settled down in a large hotel, kept by an intelligent Frenchman, in the Nevskoi Prospekt.

I cannot exactly settle in my mind whether it was this hotel or another one in the Izaak's Ploschad where one of the most pleasing features of the table d'hôte was the regular appearance, once a week, of several mighty tureens of splendidly made Irish stew. Whence the landlord had got the recipe for this grand dish I am uncertain; but its ensemble would, I am convinced, have excited the enthusiastic admiration of every son of Old Erin. The proprietor told me that once a week he had a live sheep sent up by railway from Finland. At once, when I heard this, did my mind revert to the live turtle which, nearly fifty years before, I used to see stolidly crawling about the floor of a pastry-cook's shop in Old Bond Street, with a little

flag labelled "Soup to-morrow stuck in the centre of its carapaces. That doomed mutton from the Gulf of Finland ought to have had hung round his neck an equivalent to the Greek "Thanatos"-" Irish stew on Saturday." Officers of the Imperial Guard, merchants and bankers and tchinovniks, used to flock to the hotel at the close of every week to partake of that delicious dish; and a murmur of approbation would arise from the guests at the dinner-table when the stew, in a goodsized bucket, was carried by two sturdy blond-bearded moujiks into the salle à manger, to be afterwards more elegantly served up in tureens. The great charm of the succulent preparation was that it thoroughly warmed you. As Jane Welsh Carlyle used to say of a glass of sherry, "it made all cosy inside."

But, unfortunately, there was the outer as well as the inner man to be considered; the cold out of doors was excruciatingly intense; and my well-padded paletôt was, comparatively speaking, no more a defence against the frost than a race-course dust-coat would have been. To my dismay, I found that in consequence of the assassination of the Emperor all the shops, with the exception of those where articles of food were sold, had put up their shutters, and would not reopen until after the funeral. So I continued to shiver.

The ill-conditioned courier, who had been a studgroom, turned up again in as snarling a condition as ever. "There's a new English Ambassador here," he remarked; "Lord Augustus Loftus is gone away; and you don't know the new one." I told him I had had

the honour to know the Earl of Dufferin for many years, and that I proposed to wait on his Excellency at once, and bade him accompany me. I fancy that the Ill-Conditioned One was rather pleased than otherwise when he noticed that I had no schouba-not even a sheep-skin touloupe with the woolly side in. The varlet knew very well, so I was afterwards told, that I could have sent for a furrier and hired a pelisse by the week or month; but it was evidently the ex-stud-groom's mission to gloat over the misery of people who were good to him.

Lord Dufferin was kindness itself; and I was also glad to meet at the Embassy young Lord Frederick Hamilton, the brother of the Duke of Abercorn. I only mention his name because in his case I am able to recall an odd instance of aural memory on my own part. I have often said that I have a most treacherous memory for names; and that, owing to imperfect vision, my recollection of faces is wretchedly uncertain; but as the old saying truthfully reminds us, when Heaven closes one door it opens another, and I have a singularly retentive memory for people's voices. Quite recently, coming up from Brighton for a day or two, I dined at the pleasantest of London clubs, the Beefsteak. During my repast I noticed that a good-looking gentleman opposite to me was eyeing me intently and smiling meanwhile. His countenance did not present the slightest purport or significance to me; nor did there even come over me the dim impression that I had seen him at some time in some part or another of the world.