pleasant one, next door to the kitchen and therefore quite
decently warm. I wasted a lot of time getting my stuff
across. Transport from one hotel to the other, though the
distance is not a hundred yards, cost forty roubles. I got
things straightened out, bought some books, and prepared a
list of the material needed and the people I wanted to see.


The room was perfectly clean. The chamber-maid
who came in to tidy up quite evidently took
a pride in doing her work properly, and protested against
my throwing matches on the floor. She said she had been in
the hotel since it was opened. I asked her how she liked the
new regime. She replied that there was not enough to eat,
but that she felt freer.


In the afternoon I went downstairs to the main kitchens of
the hotel, where there is a permanent supply of hot water.
One enormous kitchen is set apart for the use of people
living in the hotel. Here I found a crowd of people, all using
different parts of the huge stove. There was an old
grey-haired Cossack, with a scarlet tunic under his black,
wide-skirted, narrow-waisted coat, decorated in the
Cossack fashion with ornamental cartridges. He was
warming his soup, side by side with a little Jewess making
potato-cakes. A spectacled elderly member of the
Executive Committee was busy doing something with a little
bit of meat. Two little girls were boiling potatoes in old tin
cans. In another room set apart for washing a sturdy little