e Crimea.--Jealousies of
the Leading Nations.--Encroachments.--Death of Nicholas.--Accession of
Alexander II.

CHAPTER I.

PARENTAGE AND BIRTH OF RUSSIA.

From 600 B.C. to A.D. 910.

Primeval Russia.--Explorations of the Greeks.--Scythian
Invasion.--Character of the Scythians.--Sarmatia.--Assaults upon the
Roman Empire.--Irruption of the Alains.--Conquests of Trajan.--The
Gothic Invasion.--The Huns.--Their Character and Aspect.--The
Devastations of Attila.--The Avars.--Results of Comminglings of these
Tribes.--Normans.--Birth of the Russian Empire.--The Three Sovereigns
Rurik, Sineous and Truvor.--Adventures of Ascolod and
Dir.--Introduction of Christianity.--Usurpation of Oleg.--His
Conquests.--Expedition Against Constantinople.

Those vast realms of northern Europe, now called Russia, have been
inhabited for a period beyond the records of history, by wandering
tribes of savages. These barbaric hordes have left no monuments of
their existence. The annals of Greece and of Rome simply inform us
that they were there. Generations came and departed, passing through
life's tragic drama, and no one has told their story.

About five hundred years before the birth of our Saviour, the Greeks,
sailing up the Bosphorus and braving the storms of the Black Sea,
began to plant their colonies along its shores. Instructed by these
colonists, Herodotus, who wrote about four hundred and forty years
before Christ, gives some information respecting the then condition of
interior Russia. The first great irruption into the wastes of Russia,
of which history gives us any record, was about one hundred years
before our Saviour. An immense multitude of conglomerated tribes,
taking the general name of Scythians, with their wives and their
children, their flocks and their herds, and their warriors, fiercer
than wolves, crossed the Volga, and took possession of the whole
country between the Don and the Danube. These barbarians did not
molest the Greek colonies, but, on the contrary, were glad to learn of
them many of the rudiments of civilization. Some of these tribes
retained their ancestral habits of wandering herdsmen, and, with their
flocks, traversed the vast and treeless plains, where they found ample
pasture. Others selecting sunny and fertile valleys, scattered their
seed and cultivated the soil. Thus the Scythians were divided into two
quite distinct classes, the herdsmen and the laborers.

The tribes who then peopled