nor gambled. A Spartan soldier was not more temperate, nor more hardy, nor more chaste than he. But he was haughty, reserved, and obstinate, and seemed to care for nothing but hunting and the drilling of his troops. The ambassadors residing at his court wrote home to their masters that this new king was stupid, and was not likely ever to be formidable to his neighbors. His own subjects, seeing that he did nothing but hunt and attend parades, considered him inferior to his ancestors.

Old Dr. Franklin used to say that if a man makes a sheep ᅡ of himself, the wolves will eat him. Not less true is it, that if a man is generally supposed to be a sheep, wolves will be very likely to try and eat him.

Three kings, neighbors and allies of Charles, hearing on all hands that the young king was a fool, and knowing that he was only a boy in years, concluded that it would be an excellent time to satisfy some ancient grudges against Sweden, and to wrest a few provinces from its territory. The King of Denmark was one of these good neighbors and allies; another was the King of Poland; the third and most powerful was Peter the Great, Czar of all the Russias. Under various pretexts, these three kings were manning ships or raising troops for the same object, the spoliation of the heritage of Sweden's youthful king.

Sweden was alarmed. Her old generals were dead, her armies were unused to war, and her king was thought to be a boy, ignorant, self-willed, and incapable. The council met to consider the situation, the king presiding. The aged councillors advised that efforts should be made to divert or postpone the storm by negotiation. When the old men had spoken, the king rose and said:

"Gentlemen, I have resolved never to make an unjust war, but never to finish a just one except by the destruction of my enemies. My resolution is taken. The first who declares himself, I shall go and attack, and when I have conquered him, I hope to make the others a little afraid of me."

There was something in the manner of the king which in

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spired confidence, and the councillors departed to enter with spirit into the preparations of war. The kingdom was instantly put upon a war footing. The king laid aside his gay costumes and wore only the uniform of a Swedish general. The luxuries of the table were banished from his abode, and he partook only of soldier's fare. Submitting himself to the strictest discipline, he imposed the same upon his troops, and soon he had an army of soldiers in the highest state of efficiency. It is said that from this time to the end of his life he never tasted wine, nor indulged in any kind of vicious pleasure whatever. He was a soldier, and nothing but a soldier.

Two years passed after the first alarm before the storm burst. The year 1700 came in, which was the eighteenth year of the life of Charles XII. As he was out bear-hunting one day in the spring of that year, the news was brought to him that Denmark had begun the war by invading his province of Livonia.

He was ready. Having previously provided for that anticipated invasion, he hurried an army on board a fleet, and struck at once for the heart of Denmark, Copenhagen. Not many days elapsed after the interruption of his bear-hunt, before he had a fleet blockading the port of Copenhagen, and an army thundering at its gates.

"What is that whistling noise I hear overhead?" asked the king, as he was disembarking on the Danish shore.

"It is the musket-balls, sire," said an officer.

"Good!" said the king; "that shall be my music henceforth."

Such were the rapidity and success of the king, that in six weeks after landing on Danish soil the war was ended, and a treaty concluded which conceded to the King of Sweden everything he asked.

Meanwhile, the King of Poland was besieging Riga (which was then a Swedish city), and the czar was leading a host of a hundred thousand undisciplined barbarians against the young conqueror. Charles left the defence of Riga to a valiant old Swedish general, who succeeded in holding it, and marched himself to meet the czar with twenty thousand troops. Never was victory more sudden, more easy, or more complete than that

which these twenty thousand Swedes won over the great mob of Russians led by Peter. The czar escaped with but forty thousand men.

From that defeat the military greatness of Russia was born.

"I know well," said the czar, as he was in retreat, "that these + Swedes will beat us for a long time; but, at last, they will teach us how to conquer."

And so it proved; for, from that day, Peter began the mighty work of drilling his half-savage hordes into soldiers, — a work which is still going on, though great progress has been made in it. The Russian people attributed their defeat to sorcery and witchcraft, and we have still the prayer which was addressed to St. Nicholas on this occasion in all their churches. It was as follows:

"O thou who art our perpetual consoler in all our adversities, great Saint Nicholas, infinitely powerful — by what sin have we offended thee in our sacrifices, our homage, our salutations, our penances, that thou hast abandoned us? We implore thy assistance against these terrible, insolent, enraged, frightful, unconquerable destroyers; and yet, like lions and bears robbed of their young, they have attacked, terrified, wounded, killed by thousands, us who are thy people. As this could not have happened except by enchantment and sorcery, we pray thee, O great St. Nicholas, to be our champion and our standard-bearer, to deliver us from this crowd of sorcerers, and to drive them from our frontiers with the recompense due to them."

Charles had no sooner scattered the Russian hosts than he turned his attention to Poland. Partly by artifice and partly by victories, he, at length, dethroned the King of Poland, and caused to be elected in his stead Stanislas, a young gentleman to whom he had chanced to take a fancy. These things, however, were not done in a campaign. From the time of his leaving Sweden, in May, 1700, to the complete subjection of Poland, was a period of seven years; during which Charles and his men lived upon the country and saved vast sums of money. If Charles had then gone home, as his generals advised and

his troops desired, he might have lived in peace, and raised his country to a high rank among the powers of Europe. Puffed up by a long series of easy victories, he believed all things possible to him; so he had resolved to do to the czar what he had done to the Polish king, — drive him from his throne. But all this time Peter had been creating an army. Deep in the wildernesses of Ukraine, the Swedish troops, weakened by hunger, fatigue and disease, encountered the trained soldiers of the czar. The Russians were more than victorious. The Swedish army was utterly destroyed, and the king, badly wounded, was compelled to fly, with a handful of followers, and seek refuge in Turkey. He lost in a day the fruits of seven years of victory, -troops, treasures, glory, all were gone, and he himself was a fugitive and a beggar.

No subsequent efforts could restore his fortunes. For two years he remained in Turkey, half prisoner, half guest. All his enemies rose upon him. The King of Poland regained his throne, Denmark invaded his dominions, and the czar prepared for new victories. Escaping, at length, Charles returned to Sweden, and was carrying on the war against his enemies, when a chance shot terminated his career. This occurred in December, 1718, when he was but thirty-six years of age. He was laying siege, at the time, to one of the Danish strongholds, and, going his rounds one evening at nine, he leaned over an angle of a battery, when a ball, weighing half a pound, entered his temple, and he fell dead upon the parapet. One of his officers said, as he threw a cloak over the body:

"The play is over; let us go to supper."

The Swedes, happily delivered from this terrible scourge, hastened to make peace with all their enemies, and elected as their queen the sister of Charles XII., whom they compelled to renounce all right to bequeath the crown to her issue. The Swedes had had enough of arbitrary power; and they succeeded in controlling the power of their kings to such a degree that their monarchy was, for the next seventy years, the most limited in Europe.

MAZEPPA.

IN the year 1706, when Charles XII., King of Sweden, still in the full tide of successful warfare, had led his victorious troops into the heart of Russia, he received secret overtures from the Governor of Ukraine, a province in the south-eastern part of Europe. Ukraine belonged to Russia, though it still enjoyed the right of electing its prince, subject to the confirmation of the czar. Its inhabitants were warlike and semibarbarous, who were subject to the czar in little more than name; nor to their own elected prince did they render any more obedience than a Tartar tribe usually pays to its chief.

The Ukraine prince, who met the young King of Sweden in the forest on the banks of the Desna, engaged to furnish the king with thirty thousand troops, provisions for the Swedish army, and a large amount of treasure, the accumulation of thirty years, on condition that, at the end of the war against the czar, Ukraine should be an independent State. Charles accepted the condition, and the treaty was concluded.

The name of this powerful Ukraine chief was Ivan Stepanovitch Mazeppa. Civilized Europe first learned his name, and something of his strange history, through Voltaire, who heard the particulars from one of Charles' officers, and gave them to the public in his celebrated Life of Charles XII. Lord Byron, struck with the romantic story, as related by Voltaire, made it the subject of a poem, and it has since been performed as a drama in all countries. But for the chance meeting in London, in 1726, of Voltaire and one of the mad King of Sweden's followers, the name of Mazeppa, in all probability, had never been known beyond the confines of Russia. Mazeppa was fiftytwo years of age when he first met Charles XII. The romantic