I left Russia without seeing Babushka, but I learned that she was safe, and I knew that, in spite of disappointments, she was adjusting herself to the changed conditions and holding the faith that her country can not be permanently enslaved by a kaiser any more than it could be by a tsar. Except for their courage and their revolutionary faith, no two women could be much more unlike than Breshkovskaya and little Marie Spiridonova. If the annals of the Bolshevist government are truly written, they will record many a night when Marie Spiridonova and Nicolai Lenin matched wits and followers in the great game of revolutionary politics. Less than five feet tall and considerably under ninety pounds, she was the smallest and frailest but one of the most powerful persons in that vast country--the Little General of peasant Russia. I see her always as I saw her many times during this great red Russian year--against a background of masses upon masses of burly figures in dun-colored coats, her tiny hands waving frantically in the air while she shouted, with all the force and fire of a spirit of flame: “Tavarischi! Tavarischi! Tiche, tiche!” (Comrades! Comrades! Hush, hush!) She rattled a futile little bell occasionally; but, in the midst of that clatter of dumb men who had suddenly found their tongues, its voice was like the bleat of a lamb. She was as incongruous in those great crowds of hairy, horny sons of field and trench as the tinkling bell; yet she handled herself and her followers with the skill of a trained politician and the tact of a mother. By all the laws of human limitations, she should be dead. She was sentenced to death by the order of the Tsar’s government, when she was a girl only just barely awakened to a knowledge of the tragedy of life in her native Russia. In her first twenty-four hours in prison she died a hundred deaths at the hands of the Cossack officers charged with the pleasant duty of torturing her. Still she lived on, and her tormentors paid quietly, swiftly, and unofficially with their lives for what they had done to her. Marie Spiridonova’s companions had sworn that it should be so, and it was. During ten years at hard labor in Siberia, death should have come to relieve her, but it did not. When the news that Russia was free flashed across the steppes and into the vast white silences of northeastern Siberia, it found Marie Spiridonova alive and waiting. Two bright red spots flamed on her thin cheek-bones, and her narrow chest was racked by a wicked cough. They brought her home to Petrograd and put her tenderly to bed in a refuge prepared for home-coming exiles--put her to bed to die. Through the turbulent spring and summer she played her part in revolution from that narrow refugee cot. By fall she had become the central figure at every meeting of the peasants’ delegates, who were pouring ceaselessly into Petrograd from all parts of Russia.