Dark settled early upon the big garage. By four o’clock it was quite black. For a while we stood there, unable to distinguish one face from another, listening to them sing. Then candles were brought. One man came with a balalika, another with a tambourine, a third with an accordion. They struck up a lively village tune, and a couple of soldiers, packs and guns still on their backs, began to dance. A ring was quickly formed, and, one after another, the men from the various provinces clicked off the favorite dances of their villages. Three times the word came that Lenin had arrived, and the men lined up to salute him. Each time it was a false alarm, and they went back to their dancing. At last he came, and a mighty cheer went up. His brown eyes were shining, and the chill winter evening had painted two bright spots upon his cheeks. He wore a black fur cap and a black overcoat, and there was a brisk, pleasant cheeriness about him that the rogues’-gallery pictures of him do not suggest. “He looks like a prosperous French bourgeois banker,” said an Englishman standing beside me. “No,” I answered; “more like a contented Irishman behind a freshly filled pipe.” I was standing beside the tribunal, and he stopped to shake hands with me before he climbed to the improvised platform. He spoke briefly, telling the men that the fate of the Revolution was in their hands and they must guard it against all foes. He spoke well, but without the eloquence with which I had seen Trotzky sweep so many crowds. When he had finished, the chairman asked Albert Williams to speak. He had been studying Russian strenuously, and decided to try to talk to the men in their own language. They were as delighted as children over his effort, and when he began groping frantically for a word, Lenin laughingly supplied it. When he finished they cheered him until the building rocked. He had stolen the honors from the Commissary of Commissaries, and none was more pleased than Lenin himself. He talked with us for a few minutes, then drove away in a closed limousine with two or three other men. He had hardly got out of sight when a bullet came crashing through the windows of his car and whizzed over his head. A man sitting beside him was slightly injured, but Lenin was unhurt. It was the first of many attempts upon his life. No one ever knew who had fired the shot. The next holiday date on the Russian calendar was January 8. That was the day of the “Blessing of the Waters.” Except for the great Easter, there was formerly no holier day in all of Holy Russia. All over the Empire the people, from the Tsar in the Winter Palace to the simplest peasant in the most remote village, always turned out in festival processions. The priests, in splendid robes, with painted ikons and silken banners held aloft, marched to the banks of the frozen rivers, followed by the singing multitudes. This year the great day passed unnoticed.