How little we knew the Russians! It was six months before that prophecy began to be true. Long after the allotted two weeks, Roger Treadwell, the American consul, and I, returning from a visit to a sick countryman, raced the length of the great white Nevsky in a sleigh drawn by a wonderful black horse groomed and fed to the pink of condition, while the driver, a peacock feather rakishly nodding in his cap, shouted a challenge to another _izvostchik_. The Russian seems to be always equal to the emergency of the moment. It is in organizing the daily round of living that he seems to fail. As soon as the Bolsheviki took command, they sent commissaries to the grain districts to persuade the peasants to send supplies to Petrograd. They pleaded the need of the Revolution, and were more successful in getting a response than their predecessors had been. They discovered in the first days that carloads of cabbages and potatoes were rotting in the warehouses for lack of people to unload and distribute them. They put soldiers and Red Guardsmen to work, and when bread was scarce the multitudes were appeased with an extra ration of vegetables. It was impossible at any time during the year to buy any of the necessities of life without standing in a queue. There were queues for bread, sugar, kerosene, tobacco, goloshes, and sweets. If cheap cloth was received in any one of the shops, a line of women immediately appeared outside the door in quest of a bargain. After the fall of Riga, when the Germans were expected, queues formed in front of the trunk shops. The families who could afford it kept what they called “queue maids,” who had no other occupation than to wait in line for provisions. In one of the “want ads” I found a request for a servant, stating, “For queue work only.” It became a regular source of livelihood for many people. Children left school to stand in the queues. At first they liked it. It was exciting to go out so early in the mornings, and stand with many new people, but as the days grew colder their little hands and feet, ill-clad, made the waiting torture. The great mass of Russians in the cities had to do their own queue duty, and they came with their babies and baskets in their arms, their heads done in shawls or kerchiefs, and stood for endless hours, waiting to present a ticket entitling them to buy a pound and a half of sugar or the day’s ration of bread. The rules of behavior in the queues were created by the people themselves. At first women who came with babies were allowed to go in without waiting. Then a woman who had no children hired her neighbor’s child for ten or twenty kopecs. The trick was soon discovered, and the real mothers lost their privilege.