ian Revolution and Faints--The Bad Boy
Arranges a Wolf Hunt--Dad Threatens to Throw the Boy to the
Wolves.

St. Petersburg, Russia.--My Dear Grocery-witz: Well, sir, dad and I have
got too much of Russia the quickest of any two tourists you ever heard
of. That skirmish we saw, the day the Russians blessed the Neva, and
shot blank cartridges filled with old iron at the czar, was not a marker
to the trouble the next Sunday, when the working people marched to the
Winter Palace, to present a petition to the "Little Father."

We thought a revolution was like a play, and that it would be worth
going miles to see. Dad was in South America once when there was a
revolution, where more than a dozen greasers, with guns that wouldn't
shoot, put on a dozen different kinds of uniforms, and yelled: "Down
with the government," and frothed at the mouth, and drank buttermilk and
yelled Spanish swear words, and acted brave, until a native soldier with
white pajamas came out with a gun and shot one of the revolutionists
in the thumb, when the revolution was suppressed and the next day the
revolutionists were pounding stone, with cannon balls chained to their
legs; and dad thought a revolution in Russia would be something like
that, and that we could get on a front porch and watch it as it went
by, and joke with the revolution, and throw confetti, like it was a
carnival, but that Sunday that the Russian revolution was begun, we had
enough blood to last us all our lives.

We got a place sitting on an iron picket fence, and we saw the people
coming up the street towards the Winter Palace, dressed mostly in
blouses, and looking as innocent as a crowd of sewer diggers at home
going up to the city hall to ask for a raise in wages of two shillings a
day. Nobody had a gun, and no one would have known how to use a gun,
and all looked like poor people going to prayers. There were troops
everywhere, and every soldier acted as though he was afraid something
would happen to spoil their chance of killing anybody. The snow on the
streets was clean and as white as the wings of a peace dove, and dad
said the show was no better than a parade of laboring men at home on
Labor day.

Suddenly some officer yelled to the parade to stop, and the priest
at the head of the procession, who was carrying a cross, slowed up a
little, like the drum major of a band when the populace at home begins
to throw eggs, but they kept on, and then the shooting began,