The powers against whom he had to wage this double war of arms and diplomacy were the Tartars and Lithuanians, beyond the frontier; and the independent republics of Novgorod, Vyatka, and Pskof, and the princes of the yet unsettled appanages within.

The immediate object of consideration was obviously the Golden Horde, because all the princes and republics, and even the Poles and Lithuanians, were interested in any movement that was calculated to embarrass the common enemy.

In the thirteenth century this frontier was permanently carried forward to the Vistula by the Teutonic Knights who, under commission from the emperor Frederick II., overcame the heathen Prussians and Lithuanians; and now it began to be shown how greatly the military strength of Europe had increased.

But the name Prussia commemorates the subjugation and extinction by German conquerors and crusaders from the west of the Prussians or Bo-Russians, a tribe akin to the Letts and Lithuanians.

Prussia now became a distinct State, essentially German in character (as opposed to the Poles and Lithuanians on its Eastern border), but still remaining for a time outside the community of the other German States.

To the northeast of the Poles live the Lithuanians, whose country had been annexed to the Polish kingdom when their duke, who had married the daughter of the king of Poland, followed his father-in-law on the Polish throne.

Russia, said they, oppressed the Poles and Lithuanians, the Letts, the Esthonians, the Finns.

The Baltic provinces are peopled, not by Russians, but by two million Germans, an equal number of Letts and a somewhat greater number of Lithuanians.

But they soon reached the gnawed bones of those who had ascended before them, scattered about a small plain that was overgrown with ironweed: and through and over the tall purple blossoms came to destroy the boys the Serpent of the East, a very dreadful design with which Miramon afflicted the sleep of Lithuanians and Tartars.

Once it had been a place of dignified Episcopal worship; but years of neglect had made it unwholesome and cavern-like; and finally it was given over to a tribe of stolid Lithuanians who stuck a cheaply gilded Greek cross over the door and thronged the street with their wedding and christening processions.

The Lithuanians are a distinct race of the Indo-European stock, fair and handsome, with a language of their own, and a literature rich in folk-lore and songs.