We had bitter arguments, but he did not resent my disagreement. He knew that I was trying honestly and sympathetically to understand all of the forces at work in the Revolution, and he respected that effort. Through him I met many other Bolsheviki, and they talked frankly of their dreams and their schemes. One day a man showed me a letter from Trotzky, written in prison. It was a call to his followers--not for himself, but for his ideas. They told me that he was in constant touch with the men of his party, and was doing quite as effective work in prison as he could have done out. Jacob Peters told me much of the methods by which prisoners communicated with each other and the outside world. Occasionally a newspaper was smuggled in, and the man who received it read it hidden half under a blanket, with one eye on the spy-hole in the door, watching for the guard, and then tapped its contents on the wall to the prisoner in the next cell. By a system of dots placed according to a prearranged code under the letters in a book, the men inside the prison were kept informed of what their comrades outside were doing. The most elaborate scheme Peters concocted was carried out with the aid of a girl revolutionist. He was trying to escape, but he was deep in the black books of the prison officials and was allowed no reading matter. He took a piece of black bread, chewed it until it was in a sticky paste, and spread it on his arm to dry. Once dry it was as tough as a piece of parchment. He put his message on one side and rolled the parchment into a small ball. Just as the girl was leaving, he asked permission of the guard to kiss her good-by through the bars. The guard, seeing no harm in an innocent kiss, consented. The girl was immediately on the alert for a message. Peters slipped the ball into his mouth, and in the kiss transferred it to hers. She carried out his directions, and he succeeded in escaping. As July wore into August, there was little going on in Petrograd, and I decided to take a journey to see if I could find out how the new doctrines were being received in some of the older and more remote parts of Russia. Various stories of the dangers of travel came to us. Russian acquaintances and old residents in the foreign colony discouraged attempting travel; but an American friend, Helen Smith, a kindred spirit in eagerness for the trail, agreed to go with me. Miss Smith, who is an expert on the subject of peasant art, had traveled to Russia four times since the war. She spoke the language, and had a genuine understanding and a very real appreciation of the people. The pictured dangers had very little reality for either of us. We determined to go to Moscow, and from there to Nizhni Novgorod by rail, then up the Volga in a river steamer.