The court asked the boy what he did with the money. He gave an accounting. The most important item was fifty kopecs for a ticket to the opera at the Narodny Dom. He explained that he was miserable and depressed, and he thought if he could go to the theater the world might not seem such a gloomy place. The judges listened with sympathy, and one of them asked gravely: “Did you feel better after you went to the theater?” The boy nodded. There was nothing incongruous to the jury about the need for music. The Russian accepts it as an extenuating circumstance quite as readily as he would physical hunger. The tribunal offered no censure, but decided that the old woman must be reimbursed for the loss of her papers. The boy had no money, so the court ordered that he sell something. He said he had nothing to sell. They looked him over, and decided that his rubbers were the only things with which he could part. Rubbers, in Petrograd, were precious possessions. The lad gave them up reluctantly. Then, remembering the Narodny Dom, his face broke into a satisfied smile. “It was worth it,” he said. The most severe sentence I heard was that passed upon General Boldireff, commander of the fifth army, who was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. General Boldireff had refused to answer the summons of the Bolsheviki commander-in-chief of the army, Krylenko, to attend a council. When he was arrested, he said he was acting in accordance with the resolution of the Army Committee not to recognize the authority of any party. The Army Committee later reversed its decision, and resolved to obey the orders of Krylenko; but the General claimed not to have known this until his arrest by soldiers of his army. Jukoff asked the General how he would have behaved toward Krylenko if he had known that the Army Committee had recognized him as supreme commander-in-chief. “At the present time,” said the General, “I am a citizen of free Russia, and obey only the will of the nation as it will be expressed by the Constituent Assembly. “I wished to preserve the army under my command from the struggle of parties, which would disorganize it,” he said. “I am myself a son of the people, and honorably guarded the interests of the sons of the nation that had been intrusted to me. Those soldiers with whom I have shared hunger and cold, the mud and dirt of the trenches, the bitterness of defeat and the inspiration of victory, will admit this. I stood at my post like a sentinel, until I was removed from it by force.” The soldiers who had arrested Boldireff accused him of sabotage tending to disorganize the army, and called on the tribunal to punish him severely. Other soldiers under his command protested against the trial and pleaded in his defense. In pronouncing sentence, President Jukoff said: