Alexey Sergeitch came with me to visit Pereplotchikof one evening and was much touched to see the change in him. But we had a very lively talk of old days on the Dwina. Alexey Sergeitch is now a teacher of history in several secondary schools in Moscow. He has just published his first book, the fruit of some historical research, and he looks forward to writing other books of like character, so making a career in history. He has the directly opposite view to mine regarding Russia and we had many long and inconclusive debates on Church and State. His sister, Varvara Sergevna, is nurse in an immense military hospital on the Volhonka. I spent an evening up till midnight with her, helping to cut rolls of linen for bandages with atrociously blunt scissors. Russia has few machines for this work. Every night thousands of Russian girls are arduously cutting linen as we did with Varvara. Nicholas, my first Russian friend, whom I met in London ten years ago and tried to learn Russian from, the boy who invited me to spend my first Christmas in Russia at his father the deacon’s in Lisitchansk, is now settled down and married, and has a family at Kishtim in the Urals, where his knowledge of English has found him a place in the office of an Anglo-Russian mining company. Nicholas and I lived with another poor student, three in a room, in Moscow--that was after the Christmas in the country. Our most intimate friend was a certain Sasha, a gaunt but happy student of philology. He used to bring stories and read them aloud to our weekly student parties on Saturday evening. From him I heard first some of the stories of Kuprin and also Chekhof’s Dushetchka or “Little Soul,” which Mrs. Garnett has lately translated under the title of “The Darling”[6]--a famous story. Sasha has grown cold to Nicholas now, and I had lost sight of him, but the many references to my work in the Russian Press brought to his mind the idea that the Englishman he once knew was the same as the one now so well known. So he wrote to me, and I tried to see him this summer--married now and in good circumstances, working in the Russian Foreign Office. [6] “The Darling” by Anton Chekhof tr. by Constance Garnett.