It was nearly five when we reached the entrance of Smolney. The great building, until a few months before a private seminary where the feminine flower of Russian aristocracy was cultivated in seclusion, had suddenly become an arsenal, bristling with guns and swarming with armed men. Upstairs the Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies were gathering for the Congress of Soviets. They were coming together to decide whether the Bolshevik demand of “All power to the Soviets” should be granted. It was a question already being answered by the voice of the guns. The meeting was to open at five. At nine the crowd in the great, chaste white assembly room was still waiting for action. Outside, in the dimly lighted corridors, hundreds of men with muddy boots tramped back and forth, in and out of committee rooms. Soon after nine, a delegate from the Menshevik group announced that his party was still in caucus, unable to come to an agreement, and asked for another hour’s delay. A murmur of disapproval ran through the room. Nerves were at trigger-tension. For once, Russian patience seemed to be about to reach its limit. Another hour passed. Suddenly through the windows opening on the Neva came a steady _boom! boom! boom!_ “What’s that? What’s that?” asked the sailor of the soldier, and the soldier of the workman. A man with pale face and blazing eyes fought his way through the crowd on to the platform. “The cruiser _Aurora_ is shelling our comrades in the Winter Palace. We demand that this bloodshed shall be stopped instantly!” he shouted. “It’s a lie!” said one of them. “It’s just another trick of the bourgeois to divide our forces!” said a second. A few men hurried from the hall; but the crowd had received too many startling rumors that day to be much disturbed by another one. Again came the _boom! boom! boom!_ from the direction of the Neva. Again the murmur of question. “It’s a motor-lorry cranking up in the courtyard below,” some one ventured. “The people upstairs are moving tables around,” another suggested. That moment the attention of the crowd was diverted by the arrival of a man of medium height, square-shouldered, lean, dark, and tense-looking. His face was white, and his black hair brushed back from a wide forehead, black mustache, and small black beard, his black jacket and flowing black tie, still further emphasized the alabaster whiteness of his skin. He stood within a few feet of me, one hand in his pocket, and with sharp, quick glances took the measure of that strange sea of faces. “Here’s Trotzky!” whispered the man beside me. “Come, I want you to meet him.”