At the time of his visit to India, Nicholas II. was
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.
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