And it repaid the trouble of reading. For it stated that each regiment of guards quartered in St. Petersburg had severally taken the oath of allegiance in the chapel of the Winter Palace. And why not, if they liked to do so? It would do the soldiers no harm. Ah, but it was to Czar _Constantine_ that they had sworn allegiance. "Czar _Constantine_? Who ever heard of a Czar Constantine?" In the great confusion the press had _entirely forgotten_ to officially announce the death of Czar Alexander. "It's a slip of the pen," quoth the postmaster. "Perhaps the correspondent was drunk. Why should they not get drunk, poor devils, just once a year?" So the matter dropped. The writer of the article in question had been celebrating his name-day too freely, had got mixed, and had written, instead of Alexander, Constantine. In the next number, under _errata_, the mistake would be rectified. But the next number brought no correction; rather the "error" was repeated twofold, threefold--all edicts being published in the name of "His Majesty Czar Constantine." The death of Czar Alexander was never officially announced. The worthy news-reading public only saw from their Sunday papers what was going on. These papers gave full details of the funeral services held in all the churches of St. Petersburg, and the official odes to the dead, which sang the fame of the deceased Czar in Russian, Latin, and Greek. After that no one wondered that future edicts were promulgated in Constantine's name; he was the Czarevitch, and, according to Russian laws of succession, heir to the throne. That the people did not love him did not affect the question. What had the people to do with it? The soldiers had sworn him allegiance, and the soldiers are the empire. And what matters all this to those "happy folk" in the country-house? Their home was dear to them in Czar Alexander's time; that Constantine now reigns in his stead only makes that home dearer. The Winter Palace has got a new inmate more unwelcome than the last. The former, as he wandered silent and melancholy among his courtiers, was hard to serve; how much more the new one, who knouts, kicks, breaks men's bones, and swears! His cheerful moods excite more terror than did the other's depression. On these accounts the officer of the guards, among whose private papers was a ukase, "by command of the Czar" forbidding him to leave Pleskow beyond a day's journey, might well be called a lucky fellow. CHAPTER XLVII THE TEMPTER One stormy winter's day, on which not even his neighbors dared venture out of their houses to make their customary visit to Pushkin, a sledge, amid the tinkling of many bells, drove into the courtyard, and from out the midst of his fur wrappings and high felt boots emerged Chevalier Galban. A host stifles all inimical feeling towards his guest, the more so when he comes in such vile weather. The road was invisible from snow-drifts; it was impossible to see where one was driving.