were carried out on the night of September 22d. The doomed vessels, pierced with holes, sank in the roadstead in the presence of their crews, drawn up in parade formation alongshore. Scarcely a dry eye watched the mournful event. The sailors and marines who had humbled the Turk but a few months before in the harbor of Sinope now bent their energies to the defense of Russia's great stronghold. The men who had navigated and fought the Czar's proudest men-of-war were assigned to the duty of throwing up intrenchments, constructing subterranean mines, handling heavy siege ordnance, and of performing numerous other tasks incident to warfare ashore.

THE FOUR CABIN BOYS.

Among those brave defenders of the great fortress, our four young heroes soon distinguished themselves by their splendid courage and devotion. Their share in the defense of Sebastopol was a modest one, but it consisted, nevertheless, of eleven months' arduous service in the casemates of the Malakhoff and the Redan, during which time two of their number were seriously disabled. Novikoff made the finest record of all by creeping, unperceived during a fog, close to the advance ranks of the British, opposite the Redan fort, late in June of 1855, and discovering the pickets asleep. He promptly returned with the information, and this enabled the besieged to make a successful sally, resulting in the capture of forty Englishmen.

Farasiouk and Rinitzik were engaged in the Malakhoff fort in the transport of munitions, but during the great bombardment in June 18th they were suddenly called to help man a fifty-pound gun, and performed this duty with such pluck and fortitude that Admiral Nakhimoff personally complimented them, and promised them the Cross of Merit. The final assault on the fortress, which culminated in its capture, saw the boys on the ramparts one night, almost in the front ranks of the defenders. Two of them, Robert and Farasiouk, had just recovered from wounds received three weeks earlier. They had been sent to the Redan fort to aid in the establishment of a lazeretto, and, when the English rather unexpectedly appeared on the parapets in great force, every available man among the defenders, including even the hospital assistants, rushed to the front. The overwhelming defeat of Colonel Wyndham's columns was due to the desperate bravery of the Redan's defenders, who, though greatly outnumbered, fought like demons. The four cabin-boys were in the thick of the fight, Novikoff especially distinguishing himself by deftly tripping up an English lieutenant, and forcing him at the pistol's point to surrender his sword.

At the conclusion of peace, among the first to benefit from the imperial good-will and gratitude were the four sailor lads. The Emperor pinned a gold medal on each boy's breast, and took them under his special protection. Although they were of humble birth, he placed them in the School of Naval Cadets at St. Petersburg, and launched them on an honorable career in the service of their country. Three of them lived to attain the rank of Captain in the Russian navy. The fourth, Farasiouk, was drowned shortly after his promotion to lieutenant in the very harbor of Sebastopol, which he had helped so bravely to defend.

GREAT MEN'S SONS.

BY ELBRIDGE S. BROOKS.

THE SON OF CROMWELL.

In the famous old English village of St. Ives—famous because of a certain nursery rhyme concerning a man who, travelling toward the town, met seven wives with their cats and kits—there once lived a farmer who, later in his life, became more famous than St. Ives itself.

Out West they would have called him a ranchman. He was really a cattle farmer, with a big grazing farm that lay along the river Ouse, in what is termed "the fen country" of England. Here, where the Ouse slipped thickly and lazily through those low, green, boggy, marshy fields called the fens, this farmer raised his beef, his pork, and his mutton; and here lived his son Richard, as lazy and sluggish of nature as the river along whose banks he lounged or fished or wandered as a boy, until it was time to send him off to Felsted School, in Essex, where his brothers, before and after him, were placed for such education as those days provided.

A slow, good-natured, easy-going fellow was this boy Dick—"lazy Dick," his father often called him. He was neither as bright in mind or manner as his younger brother Harry, nor as promising a lad as his elder brother Robert. Robin was what this elder brother was called; he was the delight and hope of his fond father—then called by his neighbors "the Lord of the Fens," because of the stand he took against the King's threatened "improvement" of the marshy fen-lands. To-day the world honors and revels that sturdy farmer of the fens as Britain's mightiest man—Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England.

We catch a few glimpses—not many, unfortunately—of the quiet home at St. Ives, in which the Cromwell boys and girls lived. It was a happy and united home, blessed with a mother whom her children revered, and having as its head a father they honored and never dared to disobey.

But fathers in those days—two hundred and fifty years and more ago—though stern in their ways with children, were as fond and as loving as are the fathers of to-day, and Cromwell the farmer, Cromwell the General, Cromwell the Lord Protector, loved his children dearly, and labored for their good alike in the great palace at Whitehall as in the low, timber-framed house upon the one street of St. Ives, where the willows shivered in the wind, and the cattle grazed and fattened upon the wide marshy meadows that lined the sluggish Ouse.

How little Dick Cromwell fared as a boy at St. Ives we have little means of knowing. When he was ten years old—in the year 1636—the Cromwells moved into a bigger house at Ely, fifteen miles away. It was called Ely from the eels that wriggled about in the muddy Ouse, and is that famous cathedral town of the fens where King Canute, who tried to order back the tide, once bade his rowers stop his boat that he might hear the monks of the cathedral sing.

Probably boy Dick thought more of bobbing for eels in the Ouse than of King Canute and the monks; for there were no monks singing in England when Richard Cromwell was a boy. There was soon to be no King in England, either, and in that great uprising against principalities and powers Dick Cromwell's father was to bear an important part.

We would like to know more of Richard Cromwell's boyhood. We would like to know how he lived and what he did as a small boy on that cattle farm among the fens at St. Ives, and at the more spacious homestead in the shadow of the great gray towers of Ely Cathedral. We would like to know whether he liked sport, as most boys do, or whether he was too lazy to exert himself at play. We would like to know how he studied, and what he learned at the Free Grammar School at Felsted, where, one after the other, four of the Cromwell boys were sent; whether he loved football as much as his father did, and became a champion full-back as his father did when he was a boy.

I am afraid Richard Cromwell was just as careless at his books as at the later duties that came to him; for, from things that have come down to us, we know how his busy father, who was as ambitious for his boys as all fathers are, had but little patience with lazybones anywhere, and reproved boy Dick for his carelessness as he found fault with young Mr. Dick, in later years, for his shiftless ways.

Troublesome times came to England. The people rose in defence of their rights. The King fell. The throne and crown were abolished. The Parliament bent before the iron will of