high for a little girl of the wilderness, without for-
tune, and only half a coat-of-arms, so to speak. Do
you know that this Rezanov--Dr. Langsdorff has
told us all about him--is a great noble, one of the
ten barons of Russia, and a Chamberlain in accord-
ance with a decree of Peter the Great that court
titles should be bestowed as a reward for distin-
guished services alone? He got a fortune in his
youth by marriage with a daughter of Shelikov--
that Siberian who founded the Russian colonies in
America. The wife died almost immediately, but
the Baron's influence remained with Shelikov--for
his influence at court was even greater--and after
the older man's death, with his mother-in-law, who
is uncommonly clever. Shelikov's schemes were
but little sketches beside Rezanov's, who from merely a
courtier and a gay blood about town developed into
a great man of business, with an ambition to corre-
spond. It was he who got the Imperial ukase that
gave the Russian-American Company its power to
squeeze all the other fur hunters and traders out of
the northeast, and made Rezanov and everybody
belonging to it so rich your head would swim if I
told you the number of doubloons they spend in a
year. Nobody has ever been so clever at managing
those old beasts of autocrats as he. They think him
merely the accomplished courtier, a brilliant dilet-
tante, a condescending patron of art and letters, a
devotee of pleasure, and all the time he is pulling
their befuddled old brains about to suit himself.