his reforms. As the Tsar was
one evening sitting down to an entertainment with a large party of
ladies and gentlemen, word was brought that someone desired to see him
privately upon an important matter. He promptly excused himself and
was taken in a sledge to the appointed place. There he graciously sat
down to supper with a number of gentlemen, as if perfectly ignorant of
their plans. Suddenly his guard arrived, entered the house, and
arrested the entire party, after which Peter returned in the best of
humor to his interrupted banquet, quite as if nothing had happened.
The next day the prisoners under torture revealed the plot to
assassinate him and then lay it to the foreigners, this to be followed,
by a general massacre of Europeans--men, women, and children. The
ringleaders were first dismembered, then beheaded--their legs and arms
being displayed in conspicuous places in the city, and the rest of the
conspirators, excepting his sister Sophia, were sent to Siberia.

With this parting and salutary lesson to his subjects in 1697, Peter
started upon his strange travels--in quest of the arts of civilization!

The embassy was composed of 270 persons. Among them was a young man
twenty-five years old, calling himself Peter Mikhailof, who a few weeks
later might have been seen at Saardam in Holland, in complete outfit of
workman's clothes, in dust and by the sweat of his brow learning the
art of ship-carpentry. Such was the first introduction to Europe of
the Tsar of Russia! They had long heard of this autocrat before whom
millions trembled, ruling like a savage despot in the midst of
splendors rivaling the Arabian Nights. Now they saw him! And the
amazement can scarcely be described. He dined with the Great Electress
Sophia, afterwards first Queen of Prussia, and she wrote of him:
"Nature has given him an infinity of wit. With advantages he might
have been an accomplished man. What a pity his manners are not less
boorish!"

But Peter was not thinking of the impression he made. With an
insatiable inquisitiveness and an omnivorous curiosity, he was looking
for the secret of power in nations. Nothing escaped him--cutlery,
rope-making, paper manufacture, whaling industry, surgery, microscopy;
he was engaging artists, officers, engineers, surgeons, buying models
of everything he saw--or standing lost in admiration of a traveling
dentist plying his craft in the market, whom he took home to his
lodgings, learned