All that week Russia celebrated busily and gaily. On New Year’s Eve I found myself at the peasants’ headquarters on the Fontanka Canal. There were about a hundred of us crowded together in a small room to watch the New Year come to Petrograd. Marie Spiridonova was our hostess. We sat on benches at long tables, and ate soup, roast pig, meat cutlets, and Russian pasties made of light bread and filled with chopped cabbage and chopped meat. The room was lit with candles planted in the necks of bottles or poised upon the pointed spears of desk-files. In one corner was a Christmas tree, a sad little tree with crude red crape paper ornaments and anemic-looking candles. Outside the door, lighting the hall, where from time to time we adjourned to dance the Russian waltz or the mazurka, was a single kerosene lamp. Beside me sat a pale-faced girl with short hair, deep circles beneath her eyes, and that look of utter exhaustion which characterized all the revolutionists in those disappointing days full of the weary work of trying to make reality match dreams. At the end of the table was a typical great Russian peasant, his gray belted blouse buttoned beneath a shaggy growth of blond beard, his round blue eyes wide with questions. The toast-master was a Russian Jew with the face of a poet or a musician. The year before he would not have been allowed to live in certain parts of Petrograd unless he paid a bribe to some official for overlooking the fact of his race. This hour was his. Whatever the new year might hold, he had been a free man among men. A year since he had been an exile in a strange land, and “free Russia” a shadowy dream. A year hence-- No one could say; no one could think that far. They took the moment, conscious of all its possibilities, and gloried in it. It was a strange evening’s entertainment--an odd but typical Russian mixture of comedy and tragedy. They made speeches, and parodied the eloquence of the day by talking a strange and meaningless jumble of words, switching with lightning rapidity from one topic to another, while the crowd rocked with laughter at the strange effects they produced. Just at the merriest moment, when the Minister of Posts and Telegraphs had been tried and found guilty of a number of amusing offenses against the Revolution, and the company had voted to deprive him of his _sladky_ (dessert), some one proposed that they sing the hymn of eternal memory to the comrades who had fallen in the Revolution. Silently they stood, and, while the church bells outside chimed a requiem to the great red year of tragedy and glory, they sang the solemn tribute to their dead.