Orenberg mines; and poured out the blood of thirty thousand Russian subjects. At last he was taken. On his trial he showed great firmness; and, although unable to read or write, he answered the questions of the tribunal with wonderful ability and intelligence. He was condemned to death. According to the sentence, his hands were to be cut off first, then his feet, then his head, and finally the trunk was to be quartered. When brought upon the scaffold, and whilst the imperial ukase enumerating his crimes was read, he undressed quickly and in silence; but when they began to read the sentence, he dexterously prevented the executioner from attending to it, by asking him all manner of questions--whether his axe was in good order, whether the block was not of a less size than prescribed by law, and whether he, the executioner, had not, by chance, drank more brandy than usual, which might make his hand unsteady. "The sentence read, the magistrate and his assistant left the scaffold. 'Now, then,' said Pugatscheff to the executioner, 'let us have no mistakes; the prescribed order must be strictly observed. So you will first cut off my head----' 'The head first!' cried the executioner. 'So runs the sentence. Have a care! I have friends who would make you dearly expiate an error to my prejudice.' It was too late to call back the magistrate; and the executioner, who doubted, at last said to himself that the important affair, after all, was the death of the criminal, and that there was little difference whether it took place rather sooner or rather later. He grasped his axe; Pugatscheff laid his head on the block, and the next moment it rebounded upon the scaffold. The feet and hands were cut off after death; the culprit escaping torture by his great presence of mind." It has been asserted that an order from the empress thus humanised the cruel sentence; but this is exceedingly improbable, for she was bitter against Pugatscheff, who, ignorant Cossack as he was, had made the modern Semiramis tremble on her throne; besides, it is matter of history that, after his execution, the headsman had his tongue cut out, and was sent to Siberia. Catherine, who had affected to laugh at Pugatscheff during his life, was so ungenerous as to calumniate him after death. "This brigand," she said, in one of her letters quoted by M. Blanc, "showed himself so pusillanimous in his prison, that it was necessary to prepare him with caution to hear his sentence read, lest he should die of fear." It is quite certain, M. Blanc observes, that to his dying hour Pugatscheff inspired more fear than he felt.