An acquaintance of mine in Moscow, the wife of a colonel in the British army, was anxious to go to Petrograd to meet her husband who was expected there on his way from the front. My friend’s father, who is the managing head of a large Moscow business concern, tried to prevail on her to wait for her husband to reach her there, but she was anxious to see him at the earliest moment and insisted on her tickets being purchased. The day after she was to have gone her father called on me and told me of his intense relief at receiving, an hour before train time, a telegram from the colonel saying that he would be in Moscow the next morning. “And what do you think happened to that train my daughter was to have taken?” he asked. It was the regular night express to Petrograd, corresponding somewhat to the Congressional Limited between New York and Washington. A few miles out of Moscow a difference arose between the engineer and the stoker, and in order to settle it they stopped the train and had a fight. One of the men hit the other on the head with a monkey wrench, injuring him pretty badly. Authority of some kind stepped in and arrested the assailant. The engineer’s cab was blood-stained, and some authority unhitched the engine and sent it back to Moscow as evidence. The train all this time, with its hundreds of passengers, stood on the tracks waiting for a new engine and crew, and if it was not run into and wrecked it was because it was lucky. About the middle of August an American correspondent traveled on that same express train from Petrograd to Moscow. The night was warm, and as the Russian occupants of his carriage had the usual constitutional objection to raised windows, he insisted on leaving the door of the compartment open. In the middle of the night a band of soldiers boarded the train and went into every one of the unlocked compartments, five in all, neatly and silently looting them of all bags and suitcases. The American correspondent lost everything he possessed--extra clothes, money, passport, papers. There was a Russian staff officer in that compartment and he lost even the clothes he traveled in, and was obliged to descend in his pajamas. The conductor of the train admitted that he saw the robbery committed, that he raised no hand to prevent it, nor even pressed the signal which would have stopped the train. “They would have killed me,” he pleaded in extenuation. “Besides, it happens almost every night on a small or large scale.”