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, 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.