At first I too could see only the scars there in the great whiteness. Then it was night, and through the windows of Petrograd I saw the trees. They were candle-lighted, and the shining eyes of little children looked upon them with delight. “It’s the price,” I said. “A different destiny, but who knows--perhaps a happier one. Perhaps it is better to make the gift of a glorious hour, to find immortality in the memory of a child, than to live on to a green old age.” “Perhaps,” he said. That afternoon, along the Sadovaya, where peasant women and crippled soldiers sold herrings and candles, apples and sausages, crude toys and painted cradles, sugarless candy and ugly dolls, I found the mothers of Petrograd pathetically trying to contribute to that hour. They paid thirty rubles a dozen for tiny apples, and twelve rubles a pound for candy. It was a lean Christmas, but it was Christmas nevertheless. The world stopped for three days; war, revolution, hunger, mattered not. All of them must make way for Christmas. The restaurants and the hotel dining-rooms were closed, and, unless we had taken the precaution to lay in a supply of sardines beforehand, or had friends with a farther vision than our own, we might have gone hungry. At midnight Christmas Eve I crossed the square to St. Isaac’s for the Christmas service. The church was deserted. I stood alone in the dark under the towering columns, waiting; but nobody came. Back in the hotel, I discovered that the service was to be at four in the morning. At four, with some friends, I returned. This time the church was lighted, and the priests were there in their gold robes. There was a table where communion bread and candles were for sale. We bought the bread and the candles, and listened while the rich, deep voices of the priests sang the holiday mass. In other days that church had been packed. This morning it was practically empty. A few servant girls, a few soldiers, here and there a tired mother with four or five children--that was all. They were celebrating, but not in the cathedrals. We went back to the hotel to make tea and to fight the battles of the world--religion, economics, wars, and all the rest of it--until seven o’clock. At the Europe that night we relit the tree, and sat around the fire, talking of home. During the holiday week all of Petrograd went to the ballet, or the opera, or some other place of amusement within its means. There were morning matinées and afternoon matinées and festival performances of all sorts.