The Empress and the little Grand Duchess wore simple suits of foulard (or foulard silk, I don’t know which is proper,) with a small blue spot in it; the dresses were trimmed with blue; both ladies wore broad blue sashes about their waists; linen collars and clerical ties of muslin; low-crowned straw-hats trimmed with blue velvet; parasols and flesh-colored gloves.  The Grand Duchess had no heels on her shoes.  I do not know this of my own knowledge, but one of our ladies told me so.  I was not looking at her shoes.  I was glad to observe that she wore her own hair, plaited in thick braids against the back of her head, instead of the uncomely thing they call a waterfall, which is about as much like a waterfall as a canvas-covered ham is like a cataract.  Taking the kind expression that is in the Emperor’s face and the gentleness that is in his young daughter’s into consideration, I wondered if it would not tax the Czar’s firmness to the utmost to condemn a supplicating wretch to misery in the wastes of Siberia if she pleaded for him.  Every time their eyes met, I saw more and more what a tremendous power that weak, diffident school-girl could wield if she chose to do it.  Many and many a time she might rule the Autocrat of Russia, whose lightest word is law to seventy millions of human beings!  She was only a girl, and she looked like a thousand others I have seen, but never a girl provoked such a novel and peculiar interest in me before.  A strange, new sensation is a rare thing in this hum-drum life, and I had it here.  There was nothing stale or worn out about the thoughts and feelings the situation and the circumstances created.  It seemed strange—­stranger than I can tell—­to think that the central figure in the cluster of men and women, chatting here under the trees like the most ordinary individual in the land, was a man who could open his lips and ships would fly through the waves, locomotives would speed over the plains, couriers would hurry from village to village, a hundred telegraphs would flash the word to the four corners of an Empire that stretches its vast proportions over a seventh part of the habitable globe, and a countless multitude of men would spring to do his bidding.  I had a sort of vague desire to examine his hands and see if they were of flesh and blood, like other men’s.  Here was a man who could do this wonderful thing, and yet if I chose I could knock him down.  The case was plain, but it seemed preposterous, nevertheless—­as preposterous as trying to knock down a mountain or wipe out a continent.  If this man sprained his ankle, a million miles of telegraph would carry the news over mountains —­valleys—­uninhabited deserts—­under the trackless sea—­and ten thousand newspapers would prate of it; if he were grievously ill, all the nations would know it before the sun rose again; if he dropped lifeless where he stood, his fall might shake the thrones of half a world!  If I could have stolen his coat, I would have done it.  When I meet a man like that, I want something to remember him by.