Sugar is not the only leftover one takes home. One day I went into the Vienna restaurant on the Gogol for dinner, sitting down at a table just vacated by a very smart young officer. He left behind him on the window ledge a little parcel neatly wrapped in white paper with a pink string. It might have been a jeweler’s parcel. I picked it up with the impulse to hand it over to the waiter, but first as a matter of precaution, lest it should be really valuable, I opened a corner of the paper and examined the contents. A piece of fairly white bread as big as a small turnip, the remains of luncheon, perhaps, at the house of a rich friend. I went into a fashionable tea place in Moscow just before I left, and they served with the tea, in lieu of sugar, a kind of sticky preserve. I had with my sugarless tea a cake made without flour or sugar. It tasted like almond paste and the whole thing cost me a dollar and ten cents. Most of the shops are closed, but before most of those which remain open you may see, at any hour of the day or night, a queue of people, men, women and children, waiting to get in and buy. The people often wait in line twenty-four hours or more. They wait days to buy some things. Go home from a visit or get in from a journey at any time of night, midnight, three a. m., any hour, and you see these long, patient, waiting lines of people. They curl up on the stones of the pavement and sleep, members of a family relieve one another at intervals, but every one desperately hangs on to his place in the line. Not only do all the small shop keepers and the street peddlers have to replenish their poor little stocks by standing thus for days, but housekeepers have to feed and clothe their families that way. People who can afford servants, of course, send their servants to wait in line. The daily newspapers often contain the advertisement, “Wanted a queue maid,” meaning a woman whose sole duty it is to sleep on the sidewalk and bring home next day’s dinner. It was summer when I was in Petrograd and Moscow. Sleeping on the sidewalk left something to be desired even in warm weather. The first hint of autumn was in the air when I left on August 30. By the first of October it was cold, and by the end of November it was frigid. When the storms and the driving snows of winter set in in earnest people will not be able to sleep on the sidewalks. Where will they get food, and when starvation stares them in the face what will they do? Russia’s real crisis, political and economic, will come then, and the Bolsheviki will not be the people to overcome it. CHAPTER XVII GENERAL JANUARY, THE CONQUEROR