inauspicious opening for the coming struggle. Having thus defied the gathering storm, the Russians crossed the Dniepr and marched to the banks of the Kalka, where they prepared to meet these new foes from the east, as they had aforetime met the Polovtzi and the Petchenigs before them. But even at this critical moment the princes were not in complete accord; each was jealous of the other, each fought for his own hand. Mstislav of Galitz thought he could win the fight with his own forces and the assistance of the Polovtzi, but the latter were unable to withstand the Mongol onset and broke in wild confusion. The Russians fought well, but they fought apart and without cohesion, and were only united in one overwhelming ruin. The battle of the Kalka, on the 31st May 1224, was a terrible catastrophe in Russian history, and fitly heralded a disastrous epoch in her annals. An army of over 80,000 men was scattered like chaff before the exulting Mongols, and to add to the horror of the flight the treacherous Polovtzi, on behalf of whom the Russians had entered into the quarrel, slew and plundered as they fled. From the fatal banks of the Kalka to those of the Dniepr raced the broken bands of Russians, the laggards falling beneath the lances and sabres of their grim pursuers. Six princes, many boyarins, and thousands of soldiers were numbered among the slain. The young Daniel Romanovitch of Volhynia escaped wounded from the woeful field, while Mstislav of Kiev with two other princes defended themselves for three days in a fortified camp on the bank of the Kalka. Deluded by a false promise of security, they at length fell into the power of the Mongols, who slaughtered the men and smothered the princes under planks, holding wild carousal over their swollen bodies--a scene which recalls the “night of Cannae’s raging field.” Southern Russia lay helpless at the pleasure of these merciless enemies, who ravaged unchecked in the villages and homesteads near the scene of their victory. Then they did a most unexpected thing; they went. Retiring through Great Bulgaria, they vanished as suddenly as they had come; of their arrival and departure might almost be said what was said of their attack on Bokhara: “They came, dug, burnt, killed, robbed, went.” The Russian lands awoke as from a nightmare to find their unwelcome guests had departed. In the midst of their conquests the separate Mongol bands turned as if by common instinct back to their native haunts in the remote valley of the Onon, where they hunted and hawked after swans and cranes, antelopes and wild asses, in the odd moments when they were not engaged in hunting men. Then occurred that picturesque gathering which Howorth has so eloquently described, when the old Khan held his simple court surrounded by his family and chieftains, a little knot of desert nomads who between them had conquered half the known world.