I tried the experiment of keeping house with the wife of the _Outlook_ correspondent after he left Russia on a mission. We had a charming little apartment offered us rent free, with a maid thrown in, if we would live in it and keep it from being looted. Every one who knew a Cossack or other reliable soldier, or an American, did that when they went to the country from Petrograd. We gave up housekeeping after a week and went back to hotels, partly because the maid could not get us enough to eat, and partly because we never had any hot water. The landlord of the apartment house had cut off the wood. He said that he couldn’t get wood enough to warm the house next winter, much less provide warm baths for the tenants in summer. The railroad situation was visualized for me on a dreadful two days and nights’ journey I took on a Russian railroad last July. Miss Beatty, of the San Francisco _Bulletin_, was with me, and the train was so small and so crowded that the only berth we could get was an upper one three feet wide. The two of us slept in that berth, Miss Beatty’s head one way and mine the other. Every time the train struck a rough place on the rails the _Bulletin_ came near losing its star reporter, for she had the outside, just above an open window. That railway carriage could have seated, by close crowding, eleven passengers. On the last night of the journey twenty-five people were packed into it. They took turns sitting down. Every railroad train you get on is about as crowded as that, and one of the most difficult things to buy at present is a railroad ticket. To buy one you usually have to bribe the ticket agent or the hotel manager. You go to the office of the International Wagons-Lits and tell them that you want to go to Moscow or Kazan. You want to go to-morrow or in three days, some near date. The clerk shakes his head. “I might be able to get you a ticket and a berth in three days,” he will say. “Of course, you will have to pay a supplement; say, sixty rubles.” Pressed for particulars he will explain that some one will have to be paid to stand in line for the ticket. I paid forty rubles extra to Bennet’s, which is the Cook’s of Petrograd, for a ticket to Moscow, and that was considered a bargain. When I wanted to return I asked the hotel management in Moscow how much they would charge to send to the station and get me a ticket, and they said one hundred rubles. The ruble was then about thirty cents, so I would have had to pay, in addition to the cost of the ticket, which had just been raised about 50 per cent., thirty dollars. I got the ticket in almost the only other way possible. I acted as a courier carrying confidential papers from a foreign consulate in Moscow to an embassy in Petrograd, and the consul used his official influence to get me a ticket for the regular price only.