On the mornings when there was breakfast, I ordered two portions, to have bread for afternoon tea and late suppers. Stewart P. Elliott, a fellow San Franciscan, was an American whom the colony will never forget. He was always turning up with life-savers in the shape of boxes of biscuits or cans of condensed milk. In December, when my supplies of sugar and tea were just about exhausted, Charles Smith, the new Associated Press correspondent, arrived from Peking with tea and crackers and all sorts of priceless possessions, including two cakes of soap and a box of talcum powder. So precious a gift I had never received before. In Russia, one’s room is one’s castle. Visitors are never announced, and one must be prepared at all times for unexpected callers. The first time the hotel clerk sent an early-morning visitor up to discover me with an unmade bed, my prudish American instincts drove me in search of a screen. Once so camouflaged, I could ignore its presence in perfect calm. Life was naked in Russia--bare as the arms of the silver birches before winter came to cover them up. All that was real, all that was vital,--the best and the worst of men,--lay close to the surface. Heroes have never appealed to me; but the amazing number of simple, unobtrusive virtues that the ordinary mortal can carry about his human person is a miracle that never ceases to thrill me. There is a bond between those of us who searched for values beneath the turmoil of the revolutionary year that would be hard to break. A broader base of friendship, a deeper comradeship, is building for men and women the world over in the stress of these days of living under the shadow of death and disaster. Perhaps it is one of the best things we shall save out of the wreck of the war. We were a strange lot, we Americans. We divided naturally into two camps. Some of us were uncompromising idealists, and some pragmatists, and more were the usual complex mixture of both. Most of us took away from Russia what we brought. One of us brought the Columbia School of Journalism, and, no matter how revolution raged or food prices soared, Columbia’s star remained undimmed. A few men whose lives had been cast in entirely different places saw a new vision, and they will never be the same again. Colonel Thompson was one of these. The real test of his interest in Russia came one day soon after the fall of the Kerensky government, upon which he had banked all his hopes. “I’ve been out walking around the streets today and looking into the faces of the Red Guard,” he said. “They’ve got fine faces. They’re real--they’re sincere. Perhaps these people need us now more than ever.” It was a long journey for a Wall Street millionaire. There was another American, a New York banker, as fine a type as I have ever met. The Russian struggle thrilled him as nothing else had ever done.