NEWS OF THE WEEK.
THE magnificent and tedious funeral obsequies of Alexander III., which began. at Odessa a fortnight ago, ended in St. Petersburg on the 19th inst., when, after a final service in a Cathedral filled to suffocation with Grand Dukes and foreign Princes, and Ambassadors from all the Powers, and Russian Ministers and Generals and great ecclesiastics, the new Czar gave the corpse a final kiss, and the coffin was lowered into a grave within the building itself. It is said that on the preceding day and night a million of persons had tried to enter the Cathedral; and as the coffin was lowered the telegraph warned all stations throughout Russia, up to Vladivostock in the Far East; and as the cannon an- nounced the event the people rushed to the churches to join in a last requiem. The service in St. Petersburg, of which we have said something elsewhere, was at once strange and solemn, and in the whole of the mighty pageant the only failure seems to have been in driving the long trains which, probably from an excess of precaution, were always delayed at the wrong time and the wrong place. The wedding of the new Czar is fixed for the 26th inst., and will, though comparatively private, be a gorgeous affair, and then St. Petersburg will return to its usual condition, with this difference, that the Czar will reside within the city. As yet he seems not to have been threatened, and not to have attended to any but the most pressing affairs.
