Andre, the youngest of the brothers of Vassili, a man of feeble character, now alone remained of the royal princes at court. He was nominally the tutor of his nephew, the young emperor, Ivan IV., and though a prominent member of the council which Vassili had established, he had no influence in the government which had been grasped so energetically and despotically by Helene and her paramour Telennef. At length Andre, trembling for his own life, timidly raised the banners of revolt, and gathered quite an army around him. But he had no energy to conduct a war. He was speedily taken, and, loaded with chains, was thrown into a dungeon, where, after a few weeks of most cruel deprivations, he miserably perished. Thirty of the lords, implicated with him in the rebellion, were hung upon the trees around Novgorod. Many others were put to torture and perished on the rack. Helene, surrendering herself to the dominion of guilty love, developed the ferocity of a tigress. Sigismond, King of Poland, taking advantage of the general discontent of the Russians under the sway of Helene, formed an alliance with the horde upon the lower waters of the Don, and invaded Russia, burning and destroying with mercilessness which demons could not have surpassed. Prince Telennef headed an army to repel them. The pen wearies in describing the horrors of these scenes. One hundred thousand Russians are now flying before one hundred and fifty thousand Polanders. Hundreds of miles of territory are ravaged. Cities and villages are stormed, plundered, burned; women and children are cut down and trampled beneath the feet of cavalry, or escape shrieking into the forests, where they perish of exposure and starvation. But an army of recruits comes to the aid of the Russians. And now one hundred and fifty thousand Polanders are driven before two hundred thousand Russians. They sweep across the frontier like dust driven by the tornado. And now the cities and villages of Poland blaze; her streams run red with blood. The Polish wives and daughters in their turn struggle, shriek and die. From exhaustion the warfare ceases. The two antagonists, moaning and bleeding, wait for a few years but to recover sufficient strength to renew the strife, and then the brutal, demoniac butchery commences anew. Such is the history of man.