"My dear Excellency!" he said, tossing off a glass of vodka and eating some caviare at the great carved sideboard in his own room before sitting down to dinner, "you have been speaking of the Tsar and the Tsaritza. To the Tsar I am Christ, the saviour of Russia and the world! Their Majesties salute me; they bow to me and they kiss my hand. What higher sphere can I achieve? The Imperial children prostrate before me; they kiss my hands. Ah! my dear Excellency, I could disclose to you things which--well, which I could not relate without blushing!" It was at this period, when a friend of the "holy" peasant, Striaptcheff, a fellow-thief of Pokrovsky and a man convicted of burglary, pressed his attentions upon the "Holy Father" and demanded an appointment. Incredible as it may appear, yet the criminal in question was six days later appointed as a bishop of the Russian Church, with the usual fat emoluments, and he could scarcely read or write. Truly Holy Russia was progressing beneath the Rasputin _regime_. She had a burglar as bishop. Meanwhile, the monk proceeded at once to carry out his secret orders from Berlin. We know that the camarilla held council a week later, and that Sturmer, Protopopoff, Striaptcheff--who had now become inseparable from Rasputin--as well as Manuiloff, an ex-journalist who conducted the secret police under Sturmer, were present at the monk's house. At the meeting the false Red Cross sister from Berlin was also present. It was agreed that it would be best to remove Kerensky, who, though a headlong enthusiast, would be a very difficult man for a woman to compromise. It was known that he possessed secret sources of knowledge regarding the intention of the camarilla to betray Russia into Germany's hands, therefore the woman Molfetta was given orders to carry out her plot, to secure his assassination at the hands of a renegade Jew of Warsaw named Levinski, who was ready to commit any crime if paid for it. The attempt was made three weeks later. While Kerensky, who lived to become afterwards Prime Minister of the new Government, was turning the corner by the Alexandra Hospital to cross the Fontanka to the Sadovaya, late one night, on his way home to the Offitzerskaya, he was shot at three times by the fellow Levinski. Each shot happily went wide, and as a result Alexander Kerensky still lives to pilot Russia to her freedom. The manner in which the traitorous camarilla brought about a famine in the capital, and in certain districts in the Empire, until the people of Petrograd paraded the city crying "Give us bread, or end the war!" is well known to all. But how they attempted to carry out the dastardly orders of Berlin to create an epidemic of cholera at the same time, I will reveal with quotations from official documents in the next chapter. CHAPTER SEVEN. THE PLOT TO SPREAD EPIDEMICS IN RUSSIA.