I left the hotel, and followed the officer down the Morskaya to the telephone building two blocks below. Motor-trucks and a couple of touring cars had been placed across the street as a barricade to traffic; and the crowd, warned back by uniformed men with rifles in their hands, kept at a safe distance. Albert Williams was standing in the doorway, talking to a group of soldiers. They were very evidently not Bolsheviki, and I crossed the street to find out what had happened there. He drew me quickly into the shelter of the courtyard and began to explain. The telephone exchange was once more in the hands of the military school cadets, and they were momentarily expecting a counter-attack by the Red Guard and the sailors. A tall, dark-eyed boy, one of the ten who had stood guard over the Provisional Government in the Winter Palace, related in perfect English the events of the morning. At daybreak an automobile drove up to the door, and two officers stepped out. They said that Kerensky was on his way to Petrograd and would arrive in a short time with two regiments. They provided the boys with the seal of the Military Revolutionary Committee and the proper pass-words, told them to go to the first cluster of guards gathered around one of the street-corner fires, surprise them, overpower them by numbers, and take their guns away. Their orders then were to take the telephone exchange and the War Hotel by means of the pass-word, and hold them until Kerensky arrived. The boys started blithely forth, convinced that they were preparing the way for the restoration of the Provisional Government and it was merely a matter of an hour or two before the victorious troops of Kerensky would come to relieve them. “I don’t see why he does not come,” he ended plaintively. “We can’t hold out long alone.” At this time there was only an occasional volley, but at two o’clock the firing began in earnest from both ends of the street. The cadets, mere children in this business of war, built barricades of boxes and boards across the sidewalks, and when the supply of these was exhausted they carried logs from a wood-pile. They took up positions behind these frail protections and fired at the attacking forces, which came at them from two directions. Some hid behind the motor-trucks, resting their guns upon the engines. Some lay flat in the mud upon the wooden cobbles, and fired from underneath the cars. I watched the fight, first from behind the barricade in the courtyard, then went upstairs to a front window where I could look down upon the street. In a room on the second floor, Antonoff, head of the Red Guard and member of the Bolshevik War Commissary, was a prisoner.