His name was Dmitri, and he was hereditary Grand-Prince of all the Russias, being the son of Ivan the Terrible, and only surviving brother of Feodor, the childless successor of that blood-thirsty czar. He was carefully killed in the presence of witnesses, during his boyhood, and duly buried, with honors appropriate to his station in life; so that if Dmitri had been an ordinary mortal, or even an ordinary prince, there would have been no story of his life to tell, except the brief tragedy of his taking off. He was no ordinary prince, however, and so the trifling incident of his death during childhood had as little to do with his career as had one or two other episodes of a like nature in the history of his later life. He was born to rule Russia, and was not at all disposed to excuse himself from the performance of the duty Providence had thus imposed upon him, by pleading the two or three thorough killings to which he was subjected. The story, as preserved in authentic history, is a very interesting one, and may perhaps bear repeating here. The reader may find all the facts in any reputable history of Russia, or of the houses of Rurik and Romanoff. In his jealousy of the absolute power he wielded, Ivan the Terrible had made constant war upon his nobility--killing them, or driving them away, and in every way possible destroying whatever share of influence they possessed in the state. When he died, leaving as his successor Feodor, a weak prince, of uncertain temper and infirm intellect, the nobility--naturally enough--hoped to regain their ancient influence in the state, and might have accomplished their purpose without difficulty if their measures to that end had been taken concertedly; but, jealous as they were of the privileges of their class, they were even more tenacious of their individual and family pretensions. They quarrelled among themselves, in short, and, while they were quarrelling, a bold and ambitious man, Boris Godunof, who happened to be the czar's brother-in-law, conceived the project of becoming prime-minister and actual ruler of the empire. Indeed, his ambition extended even further than this. Not content with governing Russia in the name of Feodor, he set covetous eyes upon the purple itself, and was resolved to become czar in name as well as in fact. But this was a delicate and difficult task, and could by accomplished only at great risk and by great patience. Boris was a man of undoubted genius, extreme shrewdness, unlimited ambition, and remarkable personal courage; and difficult and dangerous as his task was, he seems never to have faltered in his purpose from the instant of its conception to the time of its execution.