that she had never
known her father, and that her mother died when she was but three
years of age. The protestant minister of Marienburg, Dr. Gluck,
chancing to see her one day, and ascertaining that she was left an
orphan and friendless, received her into his own house, and cherished
her with true parental tenderness.

The very evening before the town of Marienburg was assaulted and taken
by storm, she was married to a young Livonian sergeant, a very
excellent young man, of reputable family and possessing a little
property. In the horrors of the tempest of war which immediately
succeeded the nuptial ceremonies, her husband was slain, and as his
body could never be found, it probably was consumed in the flames,
which laid the town in ashes. General Boyer, moved with compassion,
took her under his protection. He ascertained that her character had
always been irreproachable, and he ever maintained that she continued
to be a pattern of virtue. She was but seventeen years of age when
Peter saw her. Her beauty immediately vanquished him. His wife he had
repudiated after a long disagreement, and she had retired to a
convent. Peter took the lovely child, still a child in years, under
his own care, and soon privately married her, with how much sacredness
of nuptial rites is not now known. Such was the early history of
Catharine, who subsequently became the recognized and renowned Empress
of Russia.

"That a poor stranger," says Voltaire, "who had been discovered amid
the ruins of a plundered town, should become the absolute sovereign
of that very empire into which she was led captive, is an incident
which fortune and merit have never before produced in the annals of
the world."

The city of Petersburg was founded on the 22d of May, 1703, on a
desert and marshy spot of ground, in the sixtieth degree of latitude.
The first building was a fort which now stands in the center of the
city. Though Peter was involved in all the hurry and confusion of war,
he devoted himself with marvelous energy to the work of rearing an
imperial city upon the bogs and the swamps of the Neva. It required
the merciless vigor of despotism to accomplish such an enterprise.
Workmen were marched by thousands from Kesan, from Astrachan, from the
Ukraine, to assist in building the city. No difficulties, no obstacles
were allowed to impede the work. The tzar had a low hut, built of
plank, just sufficient to shelter him from the weather, where he
superinte