could hope to seat himself upon the Muscovite throne.
Feodor had no children, but he had one brother, the lad Dmitri, who
would be his successor in the natural course of events. His existence
was sure to prove an effectual bar to all Boris's hopes; and so it was
necessary to get him out of the way before the scheme should be ripe for
execution. To accomplish this, the wily minister sent Dmitri and his
mother to the distant town of Uglitch, and there, by his orders, the
young prince was murdered, in the presence of his nurse and six other
people, and buried from his mother's residence. This was in 1591. The
lad's death was announced, of course. Indeed, it was known to nearly
everybody in Uglitch, the tocsin having been sounded, and the population
having gathered around the murdered boy, where they put to death a good
many who were suspected of complicity with the murderers. But in
publishing it abroad in Russia, Boris deemed it prudent to attribute it,
some say to a fever, others to an accidental fall upon a knife with
which the boy had been playing; and lest the people of Uglitch should
embarrass the minister by insisting upon a different diagnosis of the
boy's last illness, that prudent official put a great many of them to
death, cut the tongues out of others' heads, and banished the rest to
Siberia--laying the town in ashes. He spared the lad's mother, but shut
her up in a convent.

Dmitri was now out of the way, or, rather, he would have been if he had
had an ordinary capacity for staying comfortably killed; and Boris
redoubled his efforts to prepare the way for his own elevation to the
throne, as Feodor's successor, when that prince should chance to let the
sceptre fall from his grasp.

To secure the influence of the Church in his behalf, he bought of a
Greek bishop the right to appoint the successor of the patriarch (a sort
of Greek Church pope); and that office presently becoming vacant, he
appointed a creature of his own as head of the Church. He succeeded in
winning the favor of the inferior nobility, who were very numerous, and
made himself strong in many other ways.

Boris was a fellow of infinite good-luck; and so it fell out that, at
the precise moment when all his plans were complete, the Czar Feodor
obligingly died. So opportunely did this event happen, that grave
historians have been inclined to suspect Boris of having procured it in
some way; but of this there is no positive evidence.

Feodor dead,