Fortune, which has furnished us with many extraordinary scenes in this part of the world, and who had raised Catherine from the lowest abyss of misery and distress to the pinnacle of human grandeur, wrought another extraordinary incident in her favour some few years after her marriage with the czar, and which I find thus related in a curious manuscript of a person who was at that time in the czar's service, and who speaks of it as a thing to which he was eye-witness. An envoy from king Augustus to the court of Peter the Great, being on his return home through Courland, and having put up at an inn by the way, heard the voice of a person who seemed in great distress, and whom the people of the house were treating in that insulting manner which is but too common on such occasions: the stranger, with a tone of resentment, made answer, that they would not dare to use him thus, if he could but once get to the speech of the czar, at whose court he had perhaps more powerful protectors than they imagined. The envoy, upon hearing this, had a curiosity to ask the man some questions, and, from certain answers he let fall, and a close examination of his face, he thought he found in him some resemblance of the empress Catherine; and, when he came to Dresden, he could not forbear writing to one of his friends at Petersburg concerning it. This letter, by accident, came to the czar's hands, who immediately sent an order to prince Repnin, then governor of Riga, to endeavour to find out the person mentioned in the letter. Prince Repnin immediately dispatched a messenger to Mittau, in Courland, who, on inquiry, found out the man, and learned that his name was Charles Scavronsky; that he was the son of a Lithuanian gentleman, who had been killed in the wars of Poland, and had left two children then in the cradle, a boy and a girl, who had neither of them received any other education than that which simple nature gives to those who are abandoned by the world. Scavronsky, who had been parted from his sister while they were both infants, knew nothing further of her than that she had been taken prisoner in Marienburg, in the year 1704, and supposed her to be still in the household of prince Menzikoff, where he imagined she might have made some little fortune. Prince Repnin, agreeable to the particular orders he had received from the czar, caused Scavronsky to be seized, and conducted to Riga, under pretence of some crime laid to his charge; and, to give a better colour to the matter, at his arrival there, a sham information was drawn up against him, and he was soon after sent from thence to Petersburg, under a strong guard, with orders to treat him well upon the road.