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Show THE CZAR'S GRANDSON. Sometimes one hears little things about the Czar of Russia, which makes one inclined to pardon Nihilism, and to comprehend the dynamite plots. The other day I went to visit a very charming old lady, who is an American, and who has lived for many years in Europe. Whilst turning over the pages of her photograph album, I came across the portrait of a child, a boy of some six or eight years of age, so singularly beautiful that my attention was at once interested. The little fellow was dressed in a Knickerbocker suit of black velvet, with his fair hair cut Holbein-wise over his brow, and a lovelier or nobler image of healthful boyhood never gladdened a parent's heart. On my making some exclamation of admiration, my friend [unreadable line] same child, remarking at the same time that the picture, so far from exaggerating his beauty, hardly did it justice. She then told of her meeting with the boy and his mother in Switzerland. <br><br> The child was the son of the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia, the mother being his secretly-wedded wife. By command of the czar, the husband and wife were separated, and the latter was forced, not only to consent to divorce, but to marry another man. "How could you consent?" asked my friend, when the unhappy woman related her story. The eyes of the speaker filled with tears, and her lips quivered. "It was for my son's sake," she whispered, and then she said no more, being evidently still not free from the toils of the "giant spider of the North," as Whittier once called the czar in one of his fervent lyrics of freedom. Mrs. Harper's Letter to Phil. Telegraph. |