In all historical ages men have been found ready to believe in the pretensions of the personators who seem to spring up as the natural aftermath of a vanished dynasty or a quenched idol; pre-eminently prone to be deluded by such deceptions were the Russians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Inured by the exactions of their religion to an unquestioning faith in the supernatural, incapable from their teaching, as much as from their want of teaching, of forming a critical opinion upon a matter which admitted of doubt, and isolated from their own communities and from the sources of reliable information by vast distances and bad roads, they afforded a fit germinating bed for rumours and frauds of the flimsiest nature. Without proof many of them had accepted the theory that Boris Godounov was responsible for the murder of Dimitri Ivanovitch; equally without proof they were ready to credit the reports which began to fly about the country during the winter of 1603-1604 to the effect that the long-mourned Tzarevitch was alive and gathering an army beyond the Lit’uanian border. The explanation which accompanied this story was that Dimitri had been smuggled away from his would-be assassins at Ouglitch and another child had been killed in his stead. The fact that his mother and nurse had shrieked and swooned over his corpse, and that his relatives and the townsfolk who knew him well had had ample opportunity to detect any substitution while the body lay in state awaiting Shouyskie’s inquest, does not seem to have been taken into consideration. It was evident, from the accumulating reports that kept pouring in, that there was someone in Lit’uania, a tangible being, who claimed to be the veritable Dimitri, and it was also evident that the King of Poland and numbers of the Russ-Lit’uanian princes believed in his identity--or professed to.