Our last visit that day was to the arch villain of the old régime, Biletsky, chief of the Tsar’s secret police. Biletsky has many sins written large against his name. Few men within the length and breadth of all the Russias have been responsible for more broken hopes, more crushed lives, more human wrecks, than the master detective. He was a big fellow with iron-gray hair and beard, and a pair of sharp brown eyes, quick-shifting and penetrating. He was able, shrewd, and as hard as his reputation implied. [Illustration: The Minister of Rumania and his staff just before his brief incarceration in the Fortress of Peter and Paul] [Illustration: © Orrin S. Wightman “Old Ivan Veliki high up in the heavens faithfully thundered the hours above the citadel of church and state”] He was glad to talk--grateful, I think, for a chance. He welcomed the Bolshevik régime. Possibly it was because he believed, with most of the men of the old order, that the quickest way to restore the monarchy was to give the radicals a loose line and help them to create all the disorder possible. Perhaps it was because he thought new names on the prison roster, new hates in the revolutionary heart, would detract attention from the old. Perhaps it was only because he believed any change might hold the possibility of greater leniency for himself. Perhaps it was, as he said, because the Bolsheviki had given him newspapers and put him once more in touch with the world from which he had been so long isolated. It was quite dark when we left the prison. As I passed one of the cells in which the cadets were being held, I peered through the peep-hole in the door, and saw a group of boys with a pack of cards spread out on the mattress before them. The city was saving electric light, and the current had not yet been turned on for the night. A stub of candle lit up their faces, and revealed them intent upon their game. If they were in danger they had forgotten it. We came away, agreed upon one thing: whatever might come of chaos and disorder in this new régime, the Peter and Paul of to-day would never be a match for that Peter and Paul of the old days when violence and cruelty was an organized and deliberate policy. CHAPTER XIV MOTHER MOSCOW WEEPS It was midsummer when I went first to Moscow, and the trees against the old Kremlin wall were deep in green. Mother Moscow was haughty then--aloof, superior. She sat serene amid the golden domes of her churches that are “forty times forty,” an old, old lady, remote and inscrutable like the East, the mystery of the ages in her smile. “Petrograd is not Russia,” she said. “Float it out to sea. Let the Germans take it. It is a plague-spot. It is of the West. We shall be well rid of it!” Sometimes, in a mellower mood, she spoke of Petrograd as one might speak of a naughty child.