PETER THE GREAT, AND ALEXANDER II.

PET. HO! Old Charon! Whom, in the name of the Furies, bringst thou hither? What woebegone and terrorstricken wretch wouldst thou pass off upon me for kin of mine? This the blood of the Romanoffs!

Come, speak thou! Speak for thyself! What is thy name? ALEX. Alexander Nicolaevitch,

PET. By Peter and Paul it is he! The son of Nicolas Paulovitch-that right strong Czar and proper man. What a branch from such a tree! Hum! ... I doubt . . . . I doubt. Tell me, thou, for I have forgotten, Who was thy mother?

ALEX. The Princess Charlotte of Hohenzollern.

PET. Ha! I know nothing against her-nothing. Yet I would to God I did. It should be the son of some silken chamberlain, who comes thus trembling to the Shades. Have the Czars of Russia indeed grown such cowards in the face of death?

ALEX. No, No! . . . your pardon

your pardon . . . it is not death

not death itself. . . . but . . . . but... the manner

of it. . . So swift, so strange, so terrible! Have you not heard, my father?

PET. Heard? not I. It is long since I have sought

reports from Russia. They enrage me too much. But one told me yesterday, thou wast coming hither and I came to meet thee.

ALEX. Yesterday! yesterday!... But it was to-day, this very day that they-that I . . . . . From whom did you hear this?

PET. From one Solovieff, a fellow countryman of ours. ALEX. Solovieff! the man I sent before me, two years ago. And he knew he knew what my accursed police on earth were too blind or slothful to discover.

PET. Oh, the fellow wants not for news. Fresh batches of friends from the upper world appear to join him every day. They come by boat-loads at a time.

ALEX. Nihilists and suspects of Nihilism! The shipments of Drenteln and Melikoff . . . . . And to think that with all this they could not save my life!

PET. Speak out, mutterer, in the name of all the devils! What was this swift, and strange, and terrible death of thine ?

ALEX. I was cut off in a moment, and by violence.

Swift enough, I

PET. Hum! ha! an assassination doubt not but-strange you call it? Then times must have changed in Russia, or else the customs of our imperial house. The death thou makest all this coil about was good enough for thy grandfather, and for his father, Peter III. But tell me, what brought thee to the scarf?

ALEX. To the scarf? Nay, sir, you are indeed at fault. The czars of these days die not by the scarf but by the bombshell.

PET. The bombshell! Thy death, then, was in battle?

Holy St. Vladimir! that a czar of Russia should find aught of "strange" or "terrible" in such a fate! How will my great enemy the Swedish king, he who himself so fell at Friedrichshall, deride me! A Czar, and afraid to

ALEX. Indeed, sir, your reproaches are unjust. Mine was no death in battle. I fell by the hand of the assassin in the streets of Petersburg.

PET. What? Outside the palace! Conspiracy grows bold indeed. Who, pray were the plotters?—Orloffs? Galitzins? Dolgoroukis? let me hear their names. Was thy son among them? Had the Czarovitch a hand in it? Nay, I'll warrant he had. Ah! fool, fool! A Czar who watches not his son deserves his death.

ALEX. You wrong the son no less than the father, and as to our nobles, their plots are no longer those of the palace.

PET. What! Neither Czarovitch nor Grand Duke nor noble at the bottom of such a deed as this? Now the saints grant me patience! Thou wilt not tell me that a Czar of All the Russias has been slain by a nobody.

ALEX. Alas! my father, I would it were so. Better so than that the name of our enemy should be Everybody, and Everywhere his abode.

PET. Thy talk is strange, Alexander Nicolaevitch . . . I would hear more of this tremendous foe of thine.

ALEX. I know not that there is more to say. It is all that my police could ever succeed in finding out. My secret enemy was everywhere-from the capital of my empire to its remotest confines. No place was so near but

that he dared to risk himself in it; no spot so distant but that he hoped to reach me from it. In the ante-chamber of the courtier, in the hut of the peasant, in the barrackroom of the soldier, in the study of the professor, nay, upon the judgment seat of the judge, was my enemy to be

found.

PET. Stay! Is this the new madness that I have heard of now and again from those few with whom I have had the patience to talk of Russia? Is it

is it

how call they the frenzy? Is it Nihilism?

ALEX. Even so, my father. It is indeed that fearful scourge of our race and nation whereof you have heard. It was by Nihilists that I was slain.

PET. Then, by God, thou art rightly served; and the fellows did well to blow thee out of the world to make room for a better.

ALEX. Rightly served!

PET. Ay! for the craze is ten years old at the least, and a Czar who cannot teach or unteach his people what he wills in that time, had best hand the crown over to another and go a-hunting.

ALEX. I strove, my father, God knows with what patience, to purge my people of the poison.

PET. To purge them? to purge them? Ay, that is easily said; and any quack understands how to do it—after his fashion. But what purges didst thou use? The leaden boluses, I will engage. Thou gavest the poor devils a war. It was thy great-grandmother's recipe, and may serve well enough for some kinds of inflammation, but not this, I doubt, not this.

But.

but

... •

ALEX. Sir, we are not so un-Christian in these latter days as to make war abroad for reasons of state at home. it did so befall that a war broke out. Divine Providence ordained that a righteous quarrel should arise between ourselves as the protector of the Holy Church and the Ottoman Porte.

PET. Divine Providence befriended Catherine the Great in the same manner; and rewarded her for her instant obedience to the heavenly summons with the gift of the Crimea. What did you get for your championship of the sacred cause?

ALEX. Eastern Bessarabia and a strip of Armenia.

PET. Ha! Is that all?

strenuous servants of God

Either the czars, then, are less

than

the service itself is a worse one.

they were wont to be, or But what of your people

at home? Did the blood-letting pacify them?

ALEX. Alas, no, sir. The fever of disaffection became more acute than ever.

PET. Did I not tell thee that I doubted the treatment ? But to give it a chance it must be used as thoroughly as Catherine used it. Didst thou take too little blood from the patient, peradventure?

ALEX. My father, it was poured out like water, both on the passes of the Balkans and on the slopes of Plevna. Three times did my brother Nicholas hurl the masses of our soldiery against the Turkish intrenchments upon those fatal heights; and twice did the fierce fanatics of Osman sweep them back again with the hailstorm of their rifle bullets.

PET. Hum! It sounds like bad generalship, if it was