“We told our parents about it, but somehow they did not seem to realize its importance. There was a famine in the village that year, and they were busy trying to get food to the people. They had no time for us and our great scheme. “But this did not discourage us. We went on just the same. We cut down logs in the forest, and built a monster ‘A,’ bigger even than our dreams of it. The great night came. We set it on fire, and then, standing in breathless silence, eyes fastened on the velvet blackness, we waited. We waited and we waited. Nothing happened. Mars did not answer.” Zamiatin lifted his finger from the crimson spot upon the Bokhara cover, and settled back in his chair. For a moment we sat there, tense and quiet as that group of small boys on the edge of the forest a score of years ago. They built a letter “A” there in the City of Peter in the fall of 1917. They set it afire. Then--simple, trusting, hoping children that they are--they waited--and waited. There was nothing wrong with the letter “A,” but Mars did not answer. Blinded by schemes of conquest and dreams of Empire, Mars could not see. “Universal peace; brotherhood; no annexations or contributions; and self-definition of nations--” It was an alphabet Mars could not comprehend, born of a blind faith the glory and beauty of which Mars can not know, and the rest of us only half suspect. Zamiatin was not a Bolshevik. He belongs to the Russian _intelligentzia_. Like the others, he had preached theoretical revolution, but his spirit shrank from the hard, accomplished fact. But Zamiatin, with his boy’s experience and his artist’s visioning, had seen the letter ‘A,’ and felt the wonder and the tragedy of the dream of those men drawn back from exile to flash flaming signals at the universe. * * * * * The train that carried me away from Petrograd was almost the last to pass in safety through war-torn Finland. Troubled days were full upon her, but the frozen face of her was as calm and peaceful as a sleeping child. The City of Peter lay behind me, wrapped in the gray morning mist. Tragedy was in the air. That vague, frightful thing--the Terror--was on every man’s tongue. Apprehension was in every man’s eye. Lurking there in the black shadows of every human brain were the words: “The Germans!” To a few they were a secret hope--restored titles, estates returned. To the mass--death and destruction and shattered dreams. I looked through the mist down a long vista of coming years, and asked of the mysterious, inscrutable city what would be left of the hour and the place for another age. Time seems to have his own peculiar sense of values. He sifts out most of the things we would save. For every time the world of to-day thinks of the Franco-Prussian War it speaks a hundred times of the French Revolution. Out of the defeat of France there came that great historic milestone marking the struggle of the mass to climb from under.