might have said more, but her husband did not give her a chance.
"I know I have talked a great deal about my days of poverty and misery, and now I will tell you something different. For a time I was the ruler of all the Russias."
"Ruler!" exclaimed Mrs. Crowder and I, almost in the same breath.
"Yes," said he, "absolute ruler. And this was the way of it:
"I was in Russia in the latter part of the seventeenth century, at a time when there was great excitement in royal and political circles. The young czar Feodor had recently died, and he had named as his successor his half-brother Peter, a boy ten years of age, who afterward became Peter the Great. The late czar's young brother Ivan should have succeeded him, but he was almost an idiot. In this complicated state of things, the half-sister of Peter, the Princess Sophia, a young woman of wonderful ambition and really great abilities, rose to the occasion. She fomented a revolution; there was fighting, with all sorts of cruelties and horrors, and when affairs had quieted down she was
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