"It is an old, but a strange and terrible story," replied the chaplain. "When Ivan Basilovitch died about the end of the sixteenth century, his widow was banished to Northern Russia by the new Czar Feodor, whose Prime Minister urged that he could never reign in peace or security unless he imitated the Turks by sacrificing all who were nearly allied to the throne; so he exiled his mother, as I have said, and ordered an officer to assassinate his younger brother Demetrius. "The officer, being a humane man, was filled with horror on receiving an order so barbarous; but fearing alike to disobey, or to leave the terrible task to be fulfilled by one less scrupulous, he took the child with him to a remote district, travelling many days' journey from Moscow. Then he wrote some words indelibly on the skin of the little Prince, tied a cross of brilliants about his neck, laid him at the door of a peasant's hut, and galloped away. "To the tyrant Feodor he gave a circumstantial detail of how and where he had killed the infant Prince, and sought the promised reward. "'Receive it _thus_!' replied Feodor, who plunged a sword into his heart, the further to suppress all proof of guilt. "The young tyrant died of a poison administered by his Chancellor, and others inherited his crown; but all to perish miserably in succession. And no less than four pretenders all appeared, each calling himself Demetrius, to contest for the throne; and all the land was deluged with blood. "Some twenty years after the alleged death of the brother of Ivan, a young Cossack of the Volga was bathing in that river with some of his companions, who saw with surprise that he had chained round his neck a cross of brilliants, and that certain words in the old Muscovite character were pricked upon his back. They were examined by a neighbouring priest and found to be--- '_This is Demetrius, son of the Czar._' "Then all exclaimed that the true Demetrius had been found at last, and that a miracle from Heaven had saved him. His life was soon in peril, so he fled to Holstein, the Duke of which, after keeping him long in prison, sold him to the Emperor Michael, by whom he was savagely quartered alive. And it is the fate of this hapless heir of Russia, whose story he thinks in some points resembles his own (although he really knows but little of his own annals), that haunts the unfortunate Ivan in his gloomiest hours." CHAPTER XVI. THE TRATKIR. With evident suspicion and mistrust, Bernikoff viewed the growing intimacy between his prisoner Ivan and the Scottish Captain; and though he neither recommended that it should cease or interdicted it, as he might and perhaps ought to have done, he made many mental notes thereof.