nish with his romantic notion. People pushed around
him, struggling to get out. He turned to go and was faced, he told me,
with a remarkable figure. His description, romantic and sentimental
though he tried to make it, resolved itself into nothing more than the
sketch of an ordinary peasant, tall, broad, black-bearded, neatly clad
in blue shirt, black trousers, and high boots. This fellow stood
apparently away from the crowd, apart, and watched it all, as you so
often may see the Russian peasant doing, with indifferent gaze. In his
mild blue eyes Bohun fancied that he saw all kinds of things--power,
wisdom, prophecy--a figure apart and symbolic. But how easy in Russia it
is to see symbols and how often those symbols fail to justify
themselves! Well, I let Bohun have his fancies. "I should know that man
anywhere again," he declared. "It was as though he knew what was going
to happen and was ready for it." Then I suppose he saw my smile, for he
broke off and said no more.

And here for a moment I leave him and his adventures.

VI

I must speak, for a moment, of myself. Throughout the autumn and winter
of 1914 and the spring and summer of 1915 I was with the Russian Red
Cross on the Polish and Galician fronts. During the summer and early
autumn of 1915 I shared with the Ninth Army the retreat through Galicia.
Never very strong physically, owing to a lameness of the left hip from
which I have suffered from birth, the difficulties of the retreat and
the loss of my two greatest friends gave opportunities to my arch-enemy
Sciatica to do what he wished with me, and in October 1915 I was forced
to leave the Front and return to Petrograd. I was an invalid throughout
the whole of that winter, and only gradually during the spring of 1916
was able to pull myself back to an old shadow of my former vigour and
energy. I saw that I would never be good for the Front again, but I
minded that the less now in that the events of the summer of 1915 had
left me without heart or desire, the merest spectator of life, passive
and, I cynically believed, indifferent. I was nothing to any one, nor
was any one anything to me. The desire of my heart had slipped like a
laughing ghost away from my ken--men of my slow warmth and cautious
suspicion do not easily admit a new guest....

Moreover during this spring of 1916 Petrograd, against my knowledge,
wove webs about my feet. I had never shared the common belief that
Moscow was the only town in R