y in vain for a story so strange and romantic as
this of the great Empress and the lowly shepherd's son, whom her love
raised from a hovel to a palace, and on whom one of the most amorous and
fickle of sovereign ladies lavished honours and riches and an unwavering
devotion, until her eyes, speaking their love to the last, were closed
in death.

It was in the humblest hovel of the village of Lemesh that Alexis
Razoum drew his first breath one day in 1709. His father, Gregory
Razoum, was a shepherd, who spent his pitiful earnings in drink--a man
of violent temper who, in his drunken rages, was the terror not only of
his home but of the entire village. His wife and children cowered at his
approach; and on more than one occasion only accident (or Providence)
saved him from the crime of murder. On one such occasion, we are told,
the child Alexis, who from his earliest years had a passion for reading,
was absorbed in a book, when his father, in ungovernable fury, seized a
hatchet and hurled it at the boy's head. Luckily, the missile missed its
mark, and Alexis escaped, to find refuge in the house of a friendly
priest, who not only gave him shelter and protection, but taught him to
write, and, above all, to sing--little dreaming that he was thus paving
the way which was to lead the drunken shepherd's lad to the dizziest
heights in Russia. For the boy had a beautiful voice. When he joined the
choir of his village church, people flocked from far and near to listen
to the sweet notes that soared, pure and liquid as a nightingale's song,
above the rest. "It was," all declared, "the voice of an angel--and the
face of an angel," for Alexis was as beautiful in those days as any
child of picture or of dreams.

One day a splendidly dressed stranger chanced to enter the Lemesh church
during Mass--none other than Colonel Vishnevsky, a great Court official,
who was on his way back to Moscow from a diplomatic mission; and he
listened entranced to a voice sweeter than any he had ever heard. The
service over, he made the acquaintance of the young chorister,
interviewed his guardian, the "good Samaritan" priest, and persuaded him
to allow the boy to accompany him to the capital. Thus the shepherd's
son took weeping farewell of the good priest, of his mother, and of his
brothers and sisters; and a few weeks later the Empress and her ladies
were listening enchanted to his voice in the Imperial choir at
Moscow--but none with more delight than t