Only for the moment; for the devilish spirit of the Tsar seems to haunt all Moscow. Wherever you may go, you are reminded of him and of his horrors. You are taken to see the Romanoff House, the home of Mikhail Feodorovitch, the founder of the present dynasty, a perfect specimen of a great Boyarin’s house at the beginning of the seventeenth century, instinct with the spirit of the Orient; low, vaulted rooms, the ceilings and walls covered with frescoes and arabesques of curious designs. The doors are very low, for cunning old Nikita Romanoff, grandfather of the first Tsar of his race, was determined that those who entered his house or his presence should do proper obeisance; even the lady of the party, not a tall woman, had to bend nearly double as she crept in. Everything is kept in religious order: all the furniture, down to the very toys with which the future Tsar used to play. One hardly expected to see a relic of Ivan here. Yet even in this Romanoff family shrine is preserved his staff, an ingeniously cruel weapon, the top fashioned as a huge bird, with which in playful moods he would fell an unfortunate courtier or two, and the ferrule a sharpened point of iron, with which, leaning upon it with all his weight, he would pierce the foot of some wretch whom he called up for a close and familiar conversation, pinning him to the floor. Strange caresses! The barbarities to which great nobles and courtiers were submitted pass all belief. There is a little tower in the Kremlin from which Ivan would look down upon the great square below and feast his eyes upon the tortures of his victims, tortures ordered by himself and in which he would sometimes lend a hand. The treacheries of some of his towns—Novgorod, Volkof, Pleskof, Tver and Moscow itself, accused of intriguing with the Poles—gave him a fine opportunity for indulging in his favourite pastimes. As for the guilty traitors of Novgorod, they were driven into a huge inclosed pen, and Ivan, with his eldest son, rode in and speared them like wild boars till they were tired of the sport! And yet, in spite of all that is true in these stories, and perhaps of much more that is legendary, he does not seem to have left an unpopular memory behind him—indeed, I have heard Russians speak kindly and almost affectionately of this fiend as a sort of jovial _viveur_ rather than as a tyrant to be execrated. As for Peter the Great, he frankly admired him and, making allowance for the difference in centuries, imitated him; no doubt he would have gone further had he dared, but times had changed, and there was a limit even to his audacity.