to its infliction, unless we have to witness it, and only some of us flinch from the sight.  The softness of heart you show in this trouble seems in some strange way associated with the strength of heart which you have proved in dangers, the least of which none of us would have encountered willingly, and which, forced on us, would have unnerved us all.  I am glad to prove to you that to some extent I depart from my national character and approach, however, distantly, to yours.  I can feel for a friend’s sorrow, and I can face what you seem to consider a real danger.  But you had a purpose in asking this audience.  My ears are open—­your lips are unsealed.”

“Prince,” I replied, “what you have said opens the way to that I wished to ask.  You say truly that courage and tenderness have a common root, as have the unmanly softness and equally unmanly hardness common among your subjects.  Those for whom death ends all utterly and for ever will of necessity, at least as soon as the training of years and of generations has rendered their thought consistent, dread death with intensest fear, and love to brighten and sweeten life with every possible enjoyment.  Animal enjoyment becomes the most precious, since it is the keenest.  Higher pleasures lose half their value, when the distinction between the two is reduced to the distinction between the sensations of higher and lower nerve centres.  Thus men care too much for themselves to care for others; and after all, strong deep affection, entwined with the heartstrings, can only torture and tear the hearts for which death is a final parting.  Such love as I have felt for woman—­even such love as I felt for her, your gift, whom I have lost—­would be pain intolerable if the thought were ever present that one day we must, and any day we might, part for ever.  I put the knife against my breast, my life in your hand, when I say this, and I ask of you no secrecy, no favour for myself; but that, as I trust you, you will guard the life that is dearest to me if you take from me the power to guard it....  There are those among your subjects who are not the cowards you find around your throne, who are not brutal in their households, not incapable of tenderness and sacrifice for others.”

As I spoke I carefully watched the Prince’s face, on which no shade of displeasure was visible; rather the sentiment of one who is somewhat gratified to hear a perplexing problem solved in a manner agreeable to his wishes.

“And the reason is,” I continued, “that these men and women believe or know that they are answerable to an eternal Sovereign mightier than yourself, and that they will reap, not perhaps here, but after death as they shall have sown; that if they do not forfeit the promise by their own deed, they shall rejoin hereafter those dearest to them here.”

“There are such?” he said.  “I would they were known to me.  I had not dreamed that there were in my realm men who would screen the heart of another with their own palm.”