When the Revolution came, she was in exile in Siberia, and they brought her home and gave her a reception such as no queen has ever known. They took her protesting to the Winter Palace, and installed her there. She insisted on the tiniest little room to be found in the great building, and asked to be allowed to live in the simplicity she had always known. Her door swung always on a friendly hinge, and it was in this room, sitting behind a big flat-topped mahogany desk, that I first met her. She was seventy-three years old; but by the light in her eyes, the ring in her voice, and the courage in her soul, she appeared to me to be the youngest, the strongest, and perhaps the sanest person I had found in Petrograd. An odd procession tramped up and down the marble staircase to place its hopes and fears in the crucible of her wise old head and her stout, kind old heart. Once I found her with a comrade of the old Siberian days, who came to her to mend his broken dream. He had fought and suffered for free Russia, and returned to find himself exiled anew to that saddest of all exiles. The young radicals spoke of him as “an old fogy,” and said, with a meaningful smile, of the man who had clanged his chains across the prison floor through many dreary years: “He calls himself a Socialist.” He came to the Babushka for a new faith in himself and tolerance of his accusers. She nodded, put a pair of motherly arms around him, and kissed him on both cheeks. “Babushka knows. Have they not said that she was all very well for her day, but her day is done?” When he had gone, she turned to me with a tiny sigh. “It is a friend of mine,” she said--“a man who was twenty years in prison. Yet he is strong, but men--I think they are not so strong as women. I think they can not suffer so much. They have not such stout hearts. They get discouraged.” Once a messenger from Kerensky interrupted us with news of a mutiny in one of the regiments. “I must go immediately,” she said, “and talk to these naughty boys who have been listening again to bad advice.” Another time an invitation from the American Red Cross came. “Of course I will go to my dear Americans,” she said, “and spend the whole afternoon if they want me.” We had no better friend in all of Russia. She loved America and Americans, and never tired of talking of her experiences in our country. She asked about Jane Addams, and Alice Stone Blackwell, Ernest Poole, and Arthur Bullard. “They were all so good to me,” she said. “While I was in Siberia they sent me papers and letters. Not once did they forget me. That is how I learned to speak the English. I do not speak it very well.” I asked what America could do to help Russia.