"Hah!" resumed Bernikoff, pursuing his own thoughts, and clenching his teeth in rage and pain, "did that suckling of a Lieutenant think to deceive me--I, who have been forty years in the Russian army, and have to deal with the most cunning scoundrels between the Black Sea and the Baltic! Jagouski, too, I'll fill his mouth with gunpowder, put a fuse between his teeth, and blow his head off. By St. Sergius, I will! But, holy Saint, alleviate these pangs, by ever so little, and this night six pounds of the finest white wax shall burn before thee." He gnashed his teeth with pain, and added, "Be ready to ride in an hour, Captain; till then, leave me." CHAPTER XXI. UNDERGROUND. The Empress's court of Secret Chancery soon decided on the fate of Basil Mierowitz; the Count, his father, and his cousin Mariolizza, who had been passive, though suspected in the matter, had their cases taken into future consideration, so they were kept close prisoners while their properties and possessions were given up to pillage and military execution. Basil was condemned to be broken alive upon the wheel; but the Empress, who had a particular tenderness for handsome men, "mitigated his punishment to the less severe one of being beheaded." A brief paragraph in the _London Gazette_ of the 23rd October records this brave fellow's death, just fourteen days after his rash affair at Schlusselburg: "M. Mierowitz, in pursuance of his sentence, was publicly beheaded on Wednesday last; he behaved at his execution, as he had done throughout the whole transaction, with the greatest resignation. Six of the soldiers and under-officers who were engaged with him ran the gantelope the same day; they were so severely whipped that it is said three of them are since dead. Many more are to be punished. One, Usakoff, a Lieutenant in the Regiment of Welikolutz (_sic_) who was privy to the design, was accidentally drowned." Notwithstanding his rank and years, old Count Mierowitz was retained in a dungeon among a number of miserable Russian rogues and Polish prisoners, clad in filthy sheepskin shoubahs, many of them being afflicted with the terrible disease known as _plica polonica_, or matted hair, which hung over their necks in clotted lumps, every tube being swollen and dilated with globules of blood. The lower vaults of Schlusselburg were those built by Ivan the Terrible, for the reception of a few of the revolters of Novgorod, after he had put twenty-five thousand of her citizens to the sword. They were such prisons as--let us hope--are no longer in use, even in Russia, although the London press has asserted that, until lately, exactly such _oubliettes_ or dungeons were in active operation, and never without tenants, under the royal rule of the deposed Francis II., and prior to the remodelling of Italy by Victor Emmanuel.