Once for a few seconds I forgot the minute-hand. The waiter from the dining-car, who had grown more and more stepmotherly in the distribution of portions as the journey progressed, entered the room. He walked to the corner where half a dozen bundles of soiled table linen were stacked, and, glancing about to see that no one was looking, he swiftly untied them. From the center of each he took a fifty-pound sack of white flour. It was no longer difficult to explain the sparkling stones from the Ural Mountains appearing on the hands of the dining-car crew as the train pulled out of Vyatka, or difficult to believe the stories of the five-hundred-ruble game in progress in the dining-car of evenings. Flour in Petrograd was scarcer than Ural brilliants and far more highly priced. At a quarter to five my friends returned. There was not a room to be had in Petrograd, they said. The Hotel Europe was crowded. At the France they were sleeping in the sitting-rooms. The Astoria, which had been the best hotel in town, was occupied by the military, and no civilians were allowed. The Russian suggested that we stay where we were until the populace began to wake up,--about ten o’clock,--then consult our respective consuls. Nothing on earth could have induced me at that moment to spend five seconds longer in the fetid atmosphere of that station. Five hours was a prospect I refused even to contemplate. The guard was once more asleep and the door locked. I made my way through a labyrinth of baggage-rooms to an opening on a side street. The same groups of men were still excitedly talking, and here and there along the curb a peasant woman, with a market-basket of hard-boiled eggs, cucumbers, lemons, or sunflower seeds, offered her wares. I paused at the corner and speculated as to which road to take. The Nevsky Prospect, famous as the Champs Elysées, the Strand, and Fifth Avenue, though I knew it not for itself at the moment, stretched wide before me in one direction. To my left was another street only slightly narrower, and flanked on either side by towering buildings, large enough to house a world of little people like myself. Surely, in all those great masses of wood and stucco and stone, there was some little corner where I could put my weary head. I walked in a daze, peering up at the strange painted signs. If it had been an overcoat, a cheese, or a pair of boots for which I had been searching, it would have been quite simple; for the little shops were profusely covered with frightful paintings of all these things, designed for people who, like myself, could not read.