The excellent taste, the polished education, and high accomplishments of Natalie, which were so far superior to those of most ladies of her own rank and country then, gave a greater poignancy to the horrors of reality and imagination; yet imagination could supply no horror but what was real and sternly so. Their princely old dwelling amid the pine forests--never more would she see its dome of polished copper shining in the sun, or the wooded domain that stretched for uncounted versts around it; or her father's patrimonial village, nestling by the Louga, which bore his rafts of timber to the sea, and by night reflected the glare of those furnaces which were another source of his vast wealth, and the means of procuring a thousand luxuries. Better would it have been, had she and they and all succumbed to Catharine's iron rule, than sought the freedom of Ivan IV; but it was too late--too late, now! Was it all a dream from, which she must awaken? Strange it was, that as weariness, sleep, or a stupor stole over her, scraps of songs, frivolous ones especially, airs from operas, and so forth, occurred to her drowsy ear, as if her brain was turning; and to these the filtering plash and the sound of the rising waves and wind without seemed to mark a cadence. Suddenly a scream escaped her: she was in total darkness. Amid her sleep or stupor, a fourth night had come on--a night of storm too; for she heard the roar of the autumn rain, as it descended like a vast sheet upon the lake without. Cold and slimy things had often crossed her slender ankles, making her shrink and shudder: but now she became sensible that her feet were completely immersed in water; that the wind was bellowing without and rolling the waves against the rocks; and that the current of the lake was flooding the floor of her vault, and rising fast within it. It rose with appalling rapidity: and now the terror of a dreadful death made Natalie utter a succession of piercing shrieks, mingled with prayers to heaven. But her cries were unheard; for the same cold, icy tide that flooded her cell, filled all the corridors by which it and others on the same floor were approached. Rapidly it rose, this dark, silent, and terrible tide--rapidly and without a sound. She sprang upon her stone couch, but already the pallet was floated away. Up yet rose the invading water, and it was soon nearly to her waist; and gasping and shuddering cries were mingled with her prayers. A little more, and the narrow slit through which she could hear the bellowing wind and see the black clouds careering past one red and fiery northern star--the last gleam of life and of the outer world--would vanish from her eyes, as she perished in that miserable tomb: even as the Princess Orloff and many others have done, helpless and unheeded in their dying agony--drowned miserably, like the prison rats that swam around them.