"The next victim was the treasurer, Funikov-Kartsef, a friend of Viskovati, accused with him of the same treason, and as unjustly. He in his turn said to Ivan, 'I pray God will give thee in eternity a fitting reward for thy actions here!' He was drenched with boiling and cold water alternately, until he expired after enduring the most horrible torments. Then others were hanged, strangled, tortured, cut to pieces, killed slowly, quickly, by whatever means fancy suggested. Ivan himself took a part, stabbing and slaying without dismounting from his horse. In four hours two hundred had been put to death, and then, the carnage over, the hangmen, their clothes covered with blood, and their gory, steaming knives in their hands, surrounded the Tsar and shouted huzzah. 'Goida! Goida! Long live the Tsar! Ivan for ever! Goida! Goida!' And so shouting they went round the market-place that Ivan might examine the mutilated remains, the piled-up corpses, the actual evidences of the slaughter. Enough of bloodshed for the one day? Not a bit of it. Ivan, satiated for the moment with the slaughter, would gloat over the grief of the survivors. Wishing to see the unhappy wives of Funikov-Kartsef and of Viskovati, he forced a way into their apartments and made merry over their grief! The wife of Funikov-Kartsef he put to the torture, that he might have from her whatever treasures she possessed. Equally he wished to torture her fifteen-year-old daughter, who was groaning and lamenting at their ill fortune, but contented himself with handing her over to the by no means tender mercies of the Tsarevich Ivan. Taken afterwards to a convent, these unhappy beings shortly died of grief--it is said."--_Karamzin._ Sometimes Ivan's vagaries were less gruesome, possessing even a comic aspect:-- One day he requisitioned of his secretary 200,000 men at arms by such a day and signed the order "Johnny of Moscow." He carried a staff with a very sharp spike in the end, which, in discourse he would strike through his boyard's feet, and if they could bear it without flinching, he would favour them. He once sent to Vologda for a pot of fleas and because the town could not send the measure full, he fined the inhabitants 7000 roubles. "He once went in disguise into a village and sought shelter. The only man who would offer it was the one worst off, and at the time sore beset. Ivan promised to return, and did so with a great company and many presents, acting also as godson to the man's child, whose birth he had witnessed. Then his followers burned all the other dwellings in the village to teach the owners charity and try how good it was to lie out of doors in winter."