however, saw in the calamity only the wrath of God against a prince who had caused sacred blood to be shed; with their eyes strained upwards to the frescoed roofs of their churches they missed the human endeavour and the open-hearted charity which was striving to alleviate their misfortunes. Portents of disaster and bodings of coming trouble succeeded the famine, for the most part of a very understandable nature. Beasts of the chase became scarce in the forests, packs of famished dogs and wolves roamed round the villages, eagles screamed over Moskva, and black foxes were caught about the city, in addition to which, unknown birds and beasts, strange and therefore marvellous, were observed throughout the country. As there had been a general scarcity of vegetation, and as the towns were honeycombed by the hastily-dug graves of those who had died of want--numbering some hundreds of thousands--this sudden invasion of the forest-folk was not inexplicable. It was also said that women and animals gave birth to monsters; certainly about this time rumour gave birth to extraordinary reports, of more disquieting omen than any of the rest, that Dimitri Ivanovitch had survived the evil designs of his would-be murderers and was yet alive. The people who had credited an irritated Deity with exacting hecatombs of victims for the foul death of a Tzarevitch, were equally prone to believe that the Tzarevitch was not dead, and it only remained for the rumour to take concrete shape for Boris’s throne to be seriously imperilled. With the taint of disaffection visible around him, his government began to take a harsher tone. Although never verging upon the savagery of the later Moskovite sovereigns, the clemency of the first years of his reign was laid aside as useless. Bogdan Bielskie, who had earned the hatred of the citizens in the days of the Terrible, now incurred the displeasure of Boris by alleged contumacy; it was said that his beard was plucked piecemeal from his chin by the Tzar’s orders, but beyond this he was only banished to another district more remote than the one he had formerly administered. More thorough was the swoop upon the Romanov family; the five sons of the late member of Thedor’s Douma, Nikita Romanov, stood high in the public esteem, and stood also very near the throne. An elected prince had some cause to fear the competition of such a powerful and popular family, albeit they were not of Rurikovitch blood. The charge which was suddenly brought against them, of a design to remove the sovereign by means of poison, was probably one of those whispered calumnies which bred freely in the half-Asiatic, wholly mediæval atmosphere of Moskva. It was nevertheless a convenient excuse for destroying the influence of this dangerous party; the head of the house, Thedor, was constrained to enter a monastery, where, as the monk Filarete, he seemed safely out of the way. The other brothers underwent more or less rigorous