"Matoushka Tsaritza"

" Matoushka Tsaritza "

At the royal Danish palace of Amalienborg a choir of Cossacks sang last week from full hearts to a little, weazened, dry old lady who contrived with an effort to sit upright and queenly in an invalid's wheel chair. She is Princess Dagmar of Denmark, daughter of the late King Christian IX, more famed as the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna of all the Russias, widow of the Tsar Alexander III, mother of the executed Tsar Nicholas II, sister of the assassinated King George of Greece, venerable aunt of the British King-Emperor George V, of Danish King Christian X, of Norwegian King Haakon VII.

At 79, with all her next of kin dead and her husband's empire shattered, she sat last week with clear eyes incapable at last of further tears, as the hymns and songs that had meant life and glory welled again. The Cossacks, Tsarist officers and emigres wore the uniform of her own onetime Imperial Life Guards. "Matoushka Tsaritza!" burst out the Cossack leader, Boris Grabowski, at last. "Dear Little Mother-Empress! God and Holy Russia bless you! Oh, never shall we forget this day. . . ."

Crown Prince Christian Frederick ushered the Cossacks, now weeping, from the presence of his great-aunt. Two royal footmen wheeled her from the room, carried her chair upstairs. Still she was dry-eyed, though seemingly much moved.

Two days later, at Christie's famed London auction room, the Imperial Russian nuptial crown-- composed of double rows of brilliants, surmounted by a diamond cross--was placed on sale by the Soviet Government, hawked, cried up from an initial bid of $25,000, auctioned off at last to a Parisian jeweler, M. Founess, for $30,500.

Other imperial gems went for as little as $290, paid for a garnet necklace with bracelets to match, on which bidding started at $25. Total sales reached $402,800. A single 48-carat oval diamond brought $57,000. The major "Crown Jewels" of the Tsars (TIME, Dec. 27) still remain, of course, in Russia, guarded day and night by soldiers in tight uniforms buttoning up the back and without cuffs or pockets.

Slav fishermen and Eskimos, residents on a remote island in Bering Strait, between Siberia and Alaska, learned last week with intense surprise from the first vessel that has visited them in 15 years that Russia, Germany, Austria, Turkey are no longer empires. When the ship's captain attempted to put to sea before all these changes had been satisfactorily explained, the Slavic peasants forcibly restrained him another day, some contending to the last that his answers to their questions proved him a liar or one gone mad.