old, put them to immediate death by the sword, fire, or water, and never attained the Popish refinements of torturing their prisoners, of flaying them alive, boiling them in oil, roasting them in brazen oxen, &c. The Zaporoghians, who had parted from their brethren, when these latter had submitted to the Poles, united themselves again to those brethren, now once more free, now once more Cossacks, and from this time the existence of the Ssiecha as a separate community seems to have ceased; it became incorporated in Little Russia and remained nothing more than a standing encampment of Cossacks, ever ready at the command of the hetman of Little Russia. With Little Russia, it submitted itself to its co-religionary Russian Czar Alexis (1654), and, with Little Russia, it remained true to the Emperor Peter I. when on the field of Poltava (1709). Hetman Mazeppa proved traitor to him. But by degrees, as the civilization of Western Europe spread in Russia, and a more regular mode of administration was enforced in Little Russia, the Zaporoghian Cossacks began to grow disaffected. At last, when Catherine II. annexed to her empire the kingdom of Poland, and achieved the conquest of the Crimea and all the north-western part of the sea-board of the Black Sea, the Ssiecha had no longer any reason to prolong its existence, as it lost its position of an outpost against the foes of the country, and became surrounded by Russian possessions. Some of the Zaporoghians were loth to submit to the legislature and administration which the Czarina framed for her empire. Headed by their Ataman _Nekrassoff_, they fled to Turkey, and the existence of the Ssiecha ceased with the sound of their horsehoofs dying away in the distance. This brief sketch sufficiently proves that the Zaporoghian Cossacks had nothing in common with the Cossacks of the present day. The latter form a standing militia, living on their own lands situated oh the southern and eastern borders of Russia. They are bound to maintain at their own cost a fixed number of regiments of horse and foot, and are governed by their respective atamans. The principal of these Cossacks are, those of the _Don_, whose ataman was the renowned Platoff; those of the _Black Sea_ (_Czernomortzy_); of the _Caucasus_; of _Astrakhan_; of _Orenburg_; and of the _Ural_, one of whom was Poogachoff, the pseudo-Peter III.; of _Siberia_; and a recently formed corps of the _Trans-Baikalian Cossacks_, having the guardianship of the Russian frontier towards China. "THE NIGHT OF CHRISTMAS EYE," is a series of comic scenes taken from the life of the peasants in Little Russia in the last century. "TARASS BOOLBA," is a graphic, lively, and, what is more, a historically true picture of the state of the Zaporoghian Ssiecha at the beginning of the religious wars with Poland.