Russian. Alexander II was assassinated during March, and
column after column of print (and illustrations) appeared,
giving full details of the murder and pointing out the dan-
gers of Nihilism. The press also noticed that the ailing Earl
of Beaconsfield, now in his seventy-seventh year, rose un-
steadily with other peers in the House of Lords to speak on
the vote of condolence, as it was called, moved on the oc-
casion of the assassination of the Czar Emancipator. ("Poor,
poor Emperor," wrote Lord Beaconsfield's good friend,
Queen Victoria, in her journal, "in spite of his failings, he
was a kind and amiable man, and had been a good ruler,
wishing to do the best for his country.") ³ Nor was this the
only important news from afar to attract the notice of the
press during the early months of 1881. "The most terrible
disaster of this kind in modern times," one newspaper said
on April 10 of the earthquake which a week earlier had
killed an estimated eight thousand people and injured ten
thousand more on the Island of Chios, believed to have been
the birthplace of Homer, in the Aegean Sea.

The rank-and-file Londoner was of course less concerned
with the savage workings of nature in far-off places than he
was with her savage workings at home. It had been a re-
markably mild winter up to about the middle of January,
when cold weather set in without warming and with a
vengeance. The coldest day ever recorded in London was
January 14, when the thermometer dropped to ten degrees,
or "twenty-one degrees frost." A few days later, on January
18, it started to snow--the Great Snowstorm and the Pitiless
Storm, they called it--and it snowed unceasingly for two
days. The nation, as if asleep, had been rudely awakened
into bitter winter. "I suppose there never was a severer day
in this great city," Benjamin Disraeli, the first Earl of
Beaconsfield, wrote to his friend, Lady Chesterfield, on

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