On the occasion of his first imperial visit to Warsaw he said, in the cold, calm voice which was so hated and feared:  “Gentlemen, let us have no more dreams.”  Eleven years later he reminded an influential deputation of Polish nobles of the unforgiven and unforgotten words, commending the caution to their attention again.  He paid frequent visits to Warsaw on one excuse or another.  This dreamer would have no dreaming in his dominion.  This mean man must ever be looking at his hoard.  The chief interest in the study of a human life lies around the inexplicable.  If we were quite consistent we should be entirely dull.  No one knows why this liberal autocrat was mean to Poland.

From Warsaw, the city which has been commanded to stand still, Cartoner travelled across the plains of endless snow towards the north.  He found as he progressed a hundred signs of the awakening.  The very faces of the people had changed since he last looked upon them only a few years earlier.  These people were now a nation, conscious of their own strength.  They had fought in a great and victorious war, not because they had been commanded to fight, but because they wanted to.  They had followed with understanding the diplomatic warfare that succeeded the signing of the treaty of San Stefano.  They had won and lost.  They were men, and no longer driven beasts.

It was evening when Cartoner arrived at St. Petersburg.  The long northern twilight had begun, and the last glow of the western sky was reflected on the golden dome of St. Isaac’s, while the arrowy spire of the Admiralty shot up into a cloudless sky.

The Warsaw Railway Station is in a quiet part of the town, and the streets through which Cartoner drove in his hired sleigh were almost deserted.  It was the hour of the promenade in the Summer Garden, or the drive in the Newski Prospect, so that all the leisured class were in another quarter of the town.  St. Petersburg is, moreover, the most spacious capital in the world, where there is more room than the inhabitants can occupy, where the houses are too large and the streets too wide.  The Catherine Canal was, of course, frozen, and its broken surface had a dirty, ill-kept air, while the snow was spotted with rubbish and refuse, and trodden down into numberless paths and crossings.  Cartoner looked at it indifferently.  It had no history yet.  The streets were silent beneath their cloak of snow.  All St. Petersburg is silent for nearly half the year, and is the quietest city in the world, excepting Venice.

The sleigh sped across the Nicholas Bridge to the Vasili Island.  The river showed no signs of spring yet.  The usual pathways across it were still in use.  The Vasili Ostrov is less busy than that greater part of the city which lies across the river.  Behind the academy of Arts, and leading out of the Bolshoi Prospect, are a number of parallel streets where quiet people live—­lawyers and merchants, professors at the university or at one or other of the numerous schools and colleges facing the river and looking across it towards the English Quay.