airs. Where bribery and
corruption were discovered among these officials the knout and exile
were applied as inducements to honesty in office. Even death was
threatened; yet bribery went on. Honesty in office cannot be made to
order, even by a czar.

_MAZEPPA, THE COSSACK CHIEF._

Among the romantic characters of history none have attained higher
celebrity than the hero of our present tale, whose remarkable adventure,
often told in story, has been made immortal in Lord Byron's famous poem
of "Mazeppa." Those who wish to read it in all its dramatic intensity
must apply to the poem. Here it can only be given in plain prose.

Mazeppa was a scion of a poor but noble Polish family, and became, while
quite young, a page at the court of John Casimir, King of Poland. There
he remained until he reached manhood, when he returned to the vicinity
of his birth. And now occurred the striking event on which the fame of
our hero rests. The court-reared young man is said to have engaged in an
intrigue with a Polish lady of high rank, or at least was suspected by
her jealous husband of having injured him in his honor.

Bent upon a revenge suitable to the barbarous ideas of that age, the
furious nobleman had the young man seized, cruelly scourged, and in the
end stripped naked and firmly bound upon the back of an untamed horse of
the steppes. The wild animal, terrified by the strange burden upon its
back, was then set free on the borders of its native wilds of the
Ukraine, and, uncontrolled by bit or rein, galloped madly for miles upon
miles through forest and over plain, until, exhausted by the violence
of its flight, it halted in its wild career. For a dramatic rendering of
this frightful ride our readers must be referred to Byron's glowing
verse.

The savage Polish lord had not dreamed that his victim would escape
alive, but fortune favored the poor youth. He was found, still fettered
to the animal's back, insensible and half dead, by some Cossack
peasants, who rescued him from his fearful situation, took him to their
hut, and eventually restored him to animation.

Mazeppa was well educated and fully versed in the art of war of that
day. He made his home with his new friends, to whom his courage,
agility, and sagacity proved such warm recommendations that he soon
became highly popular among the Cossack clans. He was appointed
secretary and adjutant to Samilovitch, the hetman or chief of the
Cossacks, and on the disgrace