rooms were allotted and I knew that I had been lucky
enough to get one in the Astoria, I drove off across the
frozen river by the Liteini Bridge. The trams were running.
The town seemed absolutely quiet, and away down the river
I saw once again in the dark, which is never quite dark
because of the snow, the dim shape of the fortress, and
passed one by one the landmarks I had come to know so
well during the last six years-the Summer Garden, the
British Embassy, and the great Palace Square where I had
seen armoured cars flaunting about during the July rising,
soldiers camping during the hysterical days of the
Kornilov affair and, earlier, Kornilov himself reviewing the
Junkers. My mind went further back to the March
revolution, and saw once more the picket fire of the
revolutionaries at the corner that night when the remains of
the Tzar's Government were still frantically printing
proclamations ordering the people to go home, at the very
moment while they themselves were being besieged in the
Admiralty. Then it flung itself further back still, to the day
of the declaration of war, when I saw this same square filled
with people, while the Tzar came out for a moment on the
Palace balcony. By that time we were pulling up at the
Astoria and I had to turn my mind to something else.


The Astoria is now a bare barrack of a place, but
comparatively clean. During the war and the first part of the
revolution it was tenanted chiefly by officers, and owing to
the idiocy of a few of these at the time of the first revolution
in shooting at a perfectly friendly crowd of soldiers and