Читать книгу The Secret Dispatch; or, The Adventures of Captain Balgonie онлайн

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This state of affairs was but of short duration when Elizabeth, daughter of Peter the Great, having a strong party, seized the crown, banished the entire family of Mechlenburg, and deposing the infant monarch, Ivan IV., confined him for life a prisoner of state in the great Castle of Schlusselburg, where he had been for twenty-three years, at the period when our narrative opens.

To mention him in conversation, and still more to possess a coin bearing his effigy, incurred the guilt and insured the punishment of treason! More than twenty years after the deposition of this transitory emperor, a German tradesman, who had worked long as a cabinet-maker at St. Petersburg, went to Cronstadt, intending then to embark for his native city, Lubeck. As it was not permitted to carry out of Russia above a certain quantity of specie, an officer of customs asked the German "what he had with him?" "Only a few roubles to pay for my passage," he replied; and on being commanded to show them, one was discovered having the effigy of Ivan IV! In vain did the unhappy tradesman protest that he neither knew he had such a coin, nor from whom he had received it. Death was the penalty; but his goods were confiscated, and he was condemned to perpetual imprisonment in the mines of Siberia.