blood no longer flowed--they were dead!

The surrounding servants folded their hands in prayer for the souls
of the deceased, and then loudly commended the mild justice of their
master!

Retiring from the window, Count Munnich ordered his breakfast to be
served!(*)

(*) Such horribly cruel punishments of the serfs were at
that time no uncommon occurrence in Russia. Unhappy serfs
were daily scourged to death at the command of their
masters. Moreover, princes and generals, and even
respectable ladies, were scourged with the knout at the
command of the emperor. Yet these punishments in Russia had
nothing dishonoring in them. The Empress Catharine II. had
three of her court ladies stripped and scourged in the
presence of the whole court, for having drawn some offensive
caricatures of the great empress. One of these scourged
ladies, afterward married to a Russian magnate, was sent by
Catharine as a sort of ambassadress to Sweden, for the
purpose of inducing the King of Sweden to favor some of her
political plans.--"Memoires Secrets sur la Russie, par
Masson," vol. iii., p. 392.

From that time forward, however, Munnich's life was a continuous chain
of vexations and mortifications. As his inordinate ambition was known,
he was constantly suspected, and was reprehended with inexorable
severity for every fault.

It is true the regent raised him to the post of first minister; but
Ostermann, who recovered his health after the successful termination
of the revolutionary enterprise, by various intrigues attained to the
position of minister of foreign affairs; while to Golopkin was given the
department of the interior, so that only the war department remained
to the first minister, Munnich. He had originated and accomplished two
revolutions that he might become generalissimo, and had obtained nothing
but mortifications and humiliations that embittered every moment of his
life!

THE REGENT ANNA LEOPOLDOWNA

Anna had succeeded, she was regent; she had shaken off the burden of
the Bironic tutelage, and her word was all-powerful throughout the
immeasurable provinces of the Russian empire. Was she now happy, this
proud and powerful Anna Leopoldowna? No one had ever yet been happy
and free from care upon this Russian throne, and how, then, could Anna
Leopoldowna be so? She had read the books of Russian political history,
and that history was writte