He scratched his head. “The _barini_ won’t be able to find a room in any hotel,” he said. “But I’ll take you around for a hundred rubles….” Before the Revolution it cost _two!_ We objected, but he simply shrugged his shoulders. “It takes a good deal of courage to drive a sleigh nowadays,” he went on. We could not beat him down below fifty…. As we sped along the silent, snowy half-lighted streets, he recounted his adventures during the six days’ fighting. “Driving along, or waiting for a fare on the corner,” he said, “all of a sudden _pooff!_ a cannon ball exploding here, _pooff!_ a cannon ball there, _ratt-ratt!_ a machine-gun…. I gallop, the devils shooting all around. I get to a nice quiet street and stop, doze a little, _pooff!_ another cannon ball, _ratt-ratt_…. Devils! Devils! Devils! Brrr!” In the centre of the town the snow-piled streets were quiet with the stillness of convalescence. Only a few arc-lights were burning, only a few pedestrians hurried along the side-walks. An icy wind blew from the great plain, cutting to the bone. At the first hotel we entered an office illuminated by two candles. “Yes, we have some very comfortable rooms, but all the windows are shot out. If the _gospodin_ does not mind a little fresh air….” Down the Tverskaya the shop-windows were broken, and there were shell-holes and torn-up paving stones in the street. Hotel after hotel, all full, or the proprietors still so frightened that all they could say was, “No, no, there is no room! There is no room!” On the main streets, where the great banking-houses and mercantile houses lay, the Bolshevik artillery had been indiscriminately effective. As one Soviet official told me, “Whenever we didn’t know just where the _yunkers_ and White Guards were, we bombarded their pocketbooks….” At the big Hotel National they finally took us in; for we were foreigners, and the Military Revolutionary Committee had promised to protect the dwellings of foreigners…. On the top floor the manager showed us where shrapnel had shattered several windows. “The animals!” said he, shaking his first at imaginary Bolsheviki. “But wait! Their time will come; in just a few days now their ridiculous Government will fall, and then we shall make them suffer!” We dined at a vegetarian restaurant with the enticing name, “I Eat Nobody,” and Tolstoy’s picture prominent on the walls, and then sallied out into the streets.