mendous resources upon Russia. Alexis raised three large armies,
amounting in all to one hundred and fifty thousand men, which he sent
into the Ukraine, as the frontier country, watered by the lower
Dnieper, was then called.

The Turkish army, which was spread over the country between the Danube
and the Dniester, now crossed this latter stream, and, in solid
battalions, four hundred thousand strong, penetrated the Ukraine. They
immediately commenced the fiend-like work of reducing the whole
province to a desert. The process of destruction is swift. Flames, in
a few hours, will consume a city which centuries alone have reared. A
squadron of cavalry will, in a few moments, trample fields of grain
which have been slowly growing and ripening for months. In less than a
fortnight nearly the whole of the Ukraine was a depopulated waste, the
troops of the tzar being shut up in narrow fortresses. The King of
Poland, apprehensive that this vast Turkish army would soon turn with
all their energies of destruction upon his own territories, resolved
to march, with all the forces of his kingdom, to the aid of the
Russians. One hundred thousand Polish troops immediately besieged the
great city of Humau, which the Turks had taken, midway between the
Dnieper and the Dniester.

John Sobieski, the newly-elected King of Poland, was a veteran soldier
of great military renown. He placed himself at the head of other
divisions of the army, and endeavored to distract the enemy and to
divide their forces. At the same time, Alexis himself hastened to the
theater of war that he might animate his troops by his presence. The
Turks, finding themselves unable to advance any further, sullenly
returned to their own country by the way of the Danube. Upon the
retirement of the Turks, the Russians and the Poles began to quarrel
respecting the possession of the Ukraine. Affairs were in this
condition when the tzar Alexis, in all the vigor of manhood, was taken
sick and died. He was then in the forty-sixth year of his age. His
first wife, Maria Miloslouski, had died several years before him,
leaving two sons and four daughters. His second wife, Natalia
Nariskin, to whom he was married in the year 1671, still lived with
her two children, a son, Peter, who was subsequently entitled the
Great, as being the most illustrious monarch Russia has known, and a
daughter Natalia.

Alexis, notwithstanding the unpropitious promise of his youth, proved
one of the wises