“You have nothing to fear here,” he said. “They are fighting on the palace bridge across the Neva. Some troops just landed from the front have been attacked by the Bolsheviki.” At one o’clock we crept back to our beds. The firing had stopped as suddenly as it had commenced. At two the silence was broken by a few stray rifle shots on the Morskaya in front of the telephone exchange two blocks away. After that there was quiet for the night. By Sunday fear had lifted from the heavy heart of Petrograd. Her people were being happy while they could. St. Isaac’s Square was flooded with sunshine. The church bells, deep resounding bases and tinkling sopranos, called the faithful to worship. The nerves of Petrograd were completely relaxed. This sunny, smiling summer afternoon had been bought and paid for. But for the evidence of mangled bodies in the hospital morgues, we might have dreamed the week just past. But for the boarded windows in the Nevsky, and the sentries still guarding the telephone exchange and encamped before the Winter Palace, the sound of the machine-guns and the sight of the frightened crowd fleeing in terror might have been only a nightmare. There were no rivers of blood; the gutters did not run red. There was only a handful of victims where we had feared there might be hundreds. The Bolsheviki proclaimed the uprising a success. They said they had no desire for bloodshed, and wished only to make a demonstration of power. They had done that, and were satisfied. The riots were significant chiefly because they introduced the Bolsheviki to a world that was soon to know much more of them, and because they foreshadowed events to come. The Cossacks were hailed as deliverers. The conservative and reactionary papers wrote pæans of praise of them. The moderate Socialist press was silent. Though they had been in favor of the suppression of the Bolshevik uprising, their traditional hatred of the system of force for which the Cossacks stood made it impossible for them to rejoice. Some of the Cossacks refused to accept the rôle of hero, and passed a resolution declaring that they did not wish to be praised by the bourgeoisie. They made it clear that they were revolutionists who were with the working-people and that they could not be counted upon to defend bourgeois law and order against the masses. It was the beginning of the breach in the Cossack ranks--a breach that was to be a vital factor in revolutionary movements of the future. Late one afternoon the soldiers carried their dead in silver coffins into the great cool recesses of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, and laid them in state before the “holy gate,” with the towering columns of lapis lazuli and malachite to keep watch through the night.