In many ways the life of the old boyards was not unlike that of their Tsar. They fought and worshipped and maintained state; bought, sold and sought wealth even as he did. There remain at least two old houses of boyards in Moscow. One, the Potieshni Dvorets in the Kremlin, formerly the dwelling of the Miloslavskis, is at the present time chiefly useful as indicating the architecture of a Russian house in mediæval times; and that only so far as the exterior is concerned, for the internal arrangements have been so many times altered as to bear now but little resemblance to a typical dwelling of the seventeenth century. The other house, the Palata Romanovykh, or Dom Romanof, was at one time the dwelling of the Romanof family and has been restored to as nearly as possible resemble the state in which it was when the Tsar Michael was elected to the throne in 1613. It is situated in the Varvarka, contiguous to the spot on which the English factory stood, and in addition to being a museum of minor antiquities serves well to illustrate some of the habits of the nobles of Moscow in the sixteenth century, for the house belonged to Nikita Romanof, grandfather of the Tsar Michael, who himself gave the house in which his own father was born to the adjoining monastery. Incorporated with those buildings, it shared their vicissitudes; was injured by fire repeatedly, altered, added to, then spoiled and sacked by the French. It is not a large house: the frontage to the Varvarka is scarcely sixty feet and built on sloping ground it presents but one storey to this street. The principal entrance was from its own courtyard, where the south front presents four storeys looking over the Moskva (_v._ page 108). The ground floor is of undoubted antiquity; brick built, plastered and painted. On this foundation is reared the wooden house in the true Russian style. The low clock tower over the entrance has for a weather vane, a griffin, the arms of the Romanofs; the windows are small, ogival, and glazed with mica panes. It is impossible that in so small a house there could have been any accommodation for the multitude of retainers and body servants a boyard had always about his house. These lived in separate dwellings around the courtyard. The ground floor of Russian houses consisted of cellars and storerooms. In these vaults were kept: wine, mead, kvas, ice, frozen and salted meats and fish. The next storey in this house consists of kitchens and domestic offices--in a house not built upon sloping ground, these would be on the ground floor. The first floor, the _Bel étage_, which, in all old Russian buildings--houses, churches and shops--is reached by steps very similar to those from the courtyard to the Varvarka street level in the Dom Romanof. [Illustration: KRESTOVAIA IN THE DOM ROMANOF]