Through the summer and winter the peasants kept flocking to Petrograd. Sometimes they were sent as delegates to a convention. Quite as often they came from some far-away province, sent by their fellow villagers to find out what was really going on in Russia. The case of Mikhail Ivanovitch was typical. The gubernia where Mikhail lived was hundreds of versts from Petrograd. Mikhail had never been farther away from his little thatched hut than the distance of a fair day’s drive, there and back, for his sturdy Siberian pony. It was seven days after the overthrow of the Tsar before Mikhail knew there had been a revolution in Petrograd. The Korniloff fiasco had been replaced by a new crisis in the surging capitol before Mikhail and his friends put their heads to work on the tangled mystery. Eight months passed, and he and his neighbors were still groping about in the dark. They wanted to play their part, but they didn’t know what to do. When news of the Bolsheviki Revolution finally arrived, they made up their minds that Mikhail must go to Petrograd and find some one who would come back and tell them all about it. There came a day when Mikhail stood up in the great white hall in Smolney, his voice trembling with excitement and his blue eyes, under the sun-bleached bangs of brown hair, wide with wonder. “I came from far away,” he said. “We are dark there--very dark. We want to do the right thing, but we don’t understand. You must send some one to tell us. We will pay--the money does not matter. The revolution came, and they told us the ‘Little Father’ was no longer here. They told us we would have land and peace and implements for our farms. The same officials were still in the same offices, but instead of being cross and brutal to us they were polite to us now; yet they refused what we wanted just the same, and things did not get done any better than before. We were still poor, and they kept our land. Then you made a revolution. The officials were a little more polite, but that was all the difference.” Mikhail hesitated for a moment, hunting for words. “I know things have changed,” he said, “because it used to be that one could hardly even look at a palace, and now I may look at all the palaces as long as I like. I may go inside, and they tell me that I may even see Tsar Lenin himself.” Mikhail was the first of the peasants who had called Lenin “Tsar,” and his audience roared with delight. They appointed a committee to take him to see the chief of the People’s Commissaries, and when they sent him back to his _gubernia_ there was little he did not know about the wild ways of revolution.