and in a
minute men, women and children were rolling in the snow, bleeding and
dying, the marchers were too stunned to run, and the deadly guns kept on
spitting fire, and the street was full of dead and dying, and then the
Cossacks rode over the dead and sabered and knouted the living, and as
the snow was patched with red blood, dad fainted away and fell off the
picket fence, and hung by one pant leg, which caught on a picket, and
crowds rushed in every direction, and it was an hour before I could get
a drosky to haul dad to the hotel.
[Illustration: Hung by one pant leg 264]
Dad collapsed when he got to the hotel, and I got a doctor and a nurse,
and for two days I had to watch the revolution alone, while dad had fits
of remorse 'cause he brought me to such a charnel house, he said.
Well, if you ever go anywhere, traveling for pleasure, do not go to
Russia, because it is the saddest place on earth. I have seen no person
smile or laugh in all the ten days we have been here, except a Cossack
when he run a saber through a little girl, and his laugh was like the
coyote on the prairie when he captures a little lamb. The people look
either heart-broken or snarly, like the people confined in an insane
asylum at home.
The czar, who a week ago was loved by the people, who believed if they
went to him, as to their God, and appealed for guidance, is to-day hated
by all, and instead of "Nicholas the Good," since he scampered away to a
castle in the country, and crawled under a bed, all the people call him
"the Little Jack Rabbit," and his fate is sealed, as a bomb will blow
him into pieces so small they will have to be swept up in a dustpan for
burial, maybe before dad and I can get out of Russia.
Going to St. Petersburg for a pleasant outing is a good deal like
visiting the Chicago stockyards to watch the bloody men kill the cattle,
and the butchers in the stockyards, calloused against any feeling for
suffering animals, are like the soldiers here who shoot down their
neighbors because they are hired to do so. The murder of those unarmed
working men, that Sunday, has changed a helpless, pleading people
into anarchists with deadly bombs in their blouses, where they were
accustomed to carry black bread to sustain life, and with the menace of
Japan in the far east and an outraged people at home, Russia is in a
bad way, and if I was the czar or a grand duke, I would find a woodchuck
hole and arrange with the woodchuck for a
|