Sigismond, King of Poland, taking advantage of the general discontent of the Russians under the sway of Helene, formed an alliance with the horde upon the lower waters of the Don, and invaded Russia, burning and destroying with mercilessness which demons could not have surpassed.  Prince Telennef headed an army to repel them.  The pen wearies in describing the horrors of these scenes.  One hundred thousand Russians are now flying before one hundred and fifty thousand Polanders.  Hundreds of miles of territory are ravaged.  Cities and villages are stormed, plundered, burned; women and children are cut down and trampled beneath the feet of cavalry, or escape shrieking into the forests, where they perish of exposure and starvation.  But an army of recruits comes to the aid of the Russians.  And now one hundred and fifty thousand Polanders are driven before two hundred thousand Russians.  They sweep across the frontier like dust driven by the tornado.  And now the cities and villages of Poland blaze; her streams run red with blood.  The Polish wives and daughters in their turn struggle, shriek and die.  From exhaustion the warfare ceases.  The two antagonists, moaning and bleeding, wait for a few years but to recover sufficient strength to renew the strife, and then the brutal, demoniac butchery commences anew.  Such is the history of man.

In this brief, but bloody war, the city of Staradoub, in Russia, was besieged by an army of Poles and Tartars.  The assault was urged with the most desperate energy and fearlessness.  The defense was conducted with equal ferocity.  Thousands fell on both sides in every mangled form of death.  At last the besiegers undermined the walls, and placing beneath hundreds of barrels of gunpowder, as with the burst of a volcano, uphove the massive bastions to the clouds.  They fell in a storm of ruin upon the city, setting it on fire in many places.  Through the flames and over the smouldering ruins, Poles and Tartars, blackened with smoke and smeared with blood, rushed into the city, and in a few hours thirteen thousand of the inhabitants were weltering in their gore.  None were left alive.  And this is but a specimen of the wars which raged for ages.  The world now has but the faintest conception of the seas of blood and woe through which humanity has waded to attain even its present feeble recognition of fraternity.

In this, as in every war with Poland, Russia was gaining, ever wresting from her rival the provinces of Lithuania, and attaching them to the gigantic empire.  In the year 1534, Helene commenced the enterprise of surrounding the whole of Moscow with a ditch, and a wall capable of resisting the batterings of artillery.  An Italian engineer, named Petrok Maloi, superintended these works.  The foundation of the walls was laid with imposing religious ceremonies.  The wall was crowned with four towers at the opening of the four gates.  Helene was so conscious of the importance of augmenting the population of Russia, that she offered