dancing on the shore, and creating terrible havoc. The Tzar Morskoy then requests Sadko to select a wife; and guided again by the Tzaritza's advice, Sadko selects the last of the nine hundred maidens who file before him--a small, black-visaged maiden, named Tchernava. Had he chosen otherwise, he is told, he would never again behold "the white world," but must "forever abide in the blue sea." After a great feast which the Sea King makes for him, Sadko falls into a heavy sleep, and when he awakens from it, he finds himself on the bank of the Tchernava River, and sees his dark red ships come speeding up the Volkhoff River. Sadko returns to his palace and his young wife, builds two churches, and roams no more, but thereafter takes his ease in his own town. Between these cycles of epic songs and the Moscow, or Imperial Cycle there is a great gap. The pre-Tatar period is not represented, and the cycle proper begins with Ivan the Terrible, and ends with the reign of Peter the Great. Epic marvels are not wholly lacking in the Moscow cycle, evidently copied from the earlier cycles. But these songs are inferior in force. Fantastic as are some of the adventures in these songs, there is always a solid historical foundation. Ivan the Terrible, for instance, is credited with many deeds of his grandfather (his father being ignored), and is always represented in rather a favorable light. The conquest of Siberia, the capture of Kazan and Astrakhan, the wars against Poland, and the Tatars of Crimea, and so forth, are the principal points around which these songs are grouped. But the Peter the Great of the epics bears only a faint resemblance to the real Peter. Perhaps the most famous hero of epic song in the seventeenth century is the bandit-chief of the Volga, Stenka Razin, whose memory still lingers among the peasants of those regions. He was regarded as the champion of the people against the oppression of the nobles, and "Ilya of Murom, the Old Kazak" is represented as the captain of the brigands under him. To Stenka, also, are attributed magic powers. From the same period date also the two most popular dance-songs of the present day--the "Kamarynskaya" and "Barynya Sudarynya," its sequel. The Kamarynskaya was the district which then constituted the Ukraina, or border-marches, situated about where the government of Orel now is. The two songs present a valuable historical picture of the coarse manners of the period on that lawless frontier; hence, only a few of the lines which still subsist of these poetical chronicles can be used to the irresistibly dashing music.