his turn came, and the executioners were arranging him suitably upon the instrument of torture: "Do as you please with me," he said, "and without fear of loading your consciences, for it is not in human power to increase my sufferings." And he died without uttering a complaint. But perhaps the most extraordinary instance of coolness and self command, at the moment of a violent and cruel death, to be found in the annals of executions, is that of Pugatscheff, who, however, was no nobleman, but a Cossack of humble birth, who deserted from the Russian army after the siege and capture of Bender by General Panim, and fled to Poland, where he was concealed for a time by hermits of the Greek church. "Conversing one day with his protectors," says a French writer already referred to, "he told them, that once, during his service in General Panim's army, a Russian officer said to him, after staring him very hard in the face, 'If the emperor Peter III., my master, were not dead, I should think I now stood before him.' The hermits paid little attention to this tale; but some time afterwards one of their number, who had not yet met Pugatscheff, exclaimed, on beholding him, 'Is not that the emperor, Peter III.?' The monks then induced him to attempt an imposture they had planned." M. Blanc's account differs from this, inasmuch as it asserts the resemblance to the defunct Czar to have been very slight. Whatever the degree of likeness, Pugatscheff declared himself the husband of Catherine II. (murdered some time previously, by Prince Bariatinski and by Alexis Orloff, the brother of Catherine's lover), and thousands credited his pretensions. The Cossacks of the river Yaik (afterwards changed to the Ural by Catherine, who desired to obliterate the memory of this revolt) were just then in exceedingly bad humour. After patiently submitting to a great deal of oppression and ill usage, they had received orders to cut off their beards. This they would not do. They had relinquished, grumbling but passive, many a fair acre of pasturage; they had furnished men for a new regiment of hussars; but they rebelled outright when ordered to use a razor. The Livonian general, Traubenberg, repaired to Yaitsk with a strong staff of barbers, and began shaving the refractory Cossacks on the public market-place. The patients rose in arms, massacred general, barbers, and aide-de-camps; recognised Pugatscheff as Peter III., and swore to replace him on his throne, and to die in his defence. The adventurer was near being as successful as the monk Otrepief. Catherine herself was very uneasy, although she published contemptuous proclamations, and jested, in her letters to Voltaire, on the Marquis of Pugatscheff, as she called him. It was rather a serious subject to joke about. The impostor defeated Russian armies, and slew their generals; took towns, whose governors he impaled; burned upwards of two hundred and fifty villages; destroyed the commerce of Siberia; stopped the working of the