obsessed with the idea that the relations between Great Britain and
Russia would never really improve until the Russian railways were
linked up with the British-Indian system, a proposition which
responsible Indian Officials viewed with a marked lack of enthusiasm.
The Czarevitch was courteous, gentle and sincere, but though full of
good intentions, he was fatally inconstant of purpose, and his mental
endowments were insufficient for the tremendous responsibilities to
which he was to succeed, and in that one fact lies the pathos of the
story of this most unfortunate of monarchs.

To return from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and from the
disastrous collapse of the French Colonial Empire to my own infinitely
trivial personal experiences, I regretted the business which had
detained M. Des Etangs in Ceylon, and deprived me of the company of so
agreeable and cultivated a man-of-the-world.

There was a Dr. Munro on board the liner. Dr. Munro, at that time
Principal of a Calcutta College is, I believe, one of the greatest
Oriental scholars living. On going into the smoking-room of the
steamer one morning, I found the genial rotund little Professor at
work with an exquisitely illuminated Chinese manuscript before him. He
explained to me that it was a very interesting Chinese document of the
twelfth century, and that he was translating it into Arabic for the
benefit of his pupils. The amazing erudition of a man who could
translate off-hand an ancient Chinese manuscript into Arabic, without
the aid of dictionaries or of any works of reference, amidst all the
hubbub of the smoking-room of an ocean liner, left me fairly gasping.
Dr. Munro had acquired his Oriental languages at the University of
St. Petersburg, so, in addition to his other attainments, he spoke
Russian as fluently as English.