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 furnished flat. I didn't think there was going to be anything going on in Russia except bloodshed and bombs, and things to make you sorry that you were here, and I was willing to take chloroform and let them carry me home in a box, with my description on the cover, until the doctor told me that dad was in a condition of nervousness, that he needed something to happen to get his mind off of the awful scenes he had witnessed, and asked me if I couldn't think of something to excite him and wake him up, and then dad said, after he got so he could go out doors: “Hennery, you have always been Johnny on the spot when I needed diversion, and I want you to take your brain apart, and oil the works, and see if you can't conjure up something to get my blood circulating and my pores open for business, and anything you think of goes, and I swear I will not kick if you scare the boots off of me.”