“On the evening of November 12 Kerensky sent a proclamation to the revolutionary troops to lay down their arms. The Kerensky troops had opened artillery fire. Our artillery replied and silenced the enemy. The Cossacks started an offensive attack but the withering fire of the sailors, Red Guards, and soldiers compelled them to turn back. We have cut into the ranks of the enemy--the enemy is running. Our troops are pursuing. Lettish sharpshooters are arriving from the front and approaching Kerensky’s rear. An order for his arrest has been issued.” Kerensky’s associates in Petrograd tried to keep in touch with him to the last minute, but the scraps of information they received were unilluminating, for he himself could not tell how long he would be able to hold his men. Their distaste for killing each other was far greater than their loyalty to any individual or institution. Meanwhile the city shuddered at the tales of frightfulness centered around the ancient Fortress of Peter and Paul, where the ministers of the Kerensky Cabinet and the military school cadets were imprisoned. Mothers, driven nearly mad by the stories of starvation, cruelties, and atrocities, appealed frantically to the city Duma and the American Red Cross Mission to investigate these reports. At the request of the Duma and the American Mission, I became one of a committee of four to visit the prison and interview the inmates. Two of us--Daddy R. and M. Mikhailoff, of the London _Telegraph_--were Russians. We walked in awed silence through the arched gate in the massive outer wall, each busy with his own thoughts. To the two Russians this was a day never to be forgotten. Both of them had been old revolutionists, and Mikhailoff had been a prisoner in this very fortress not many years before. For me the place was full of ghosts. They walked before me in a strange procession. I watched while Peter, who stalks the city by day and by night, killed his own son. I saw Catherine bury alive the critics who found her marital practices not to their liking. I saw the Decembrists--they who first fought to free the serfs--martyred before my eyes. Last of all, I saw the fortress gate swing wide on that glad March day when the revolutionists took possession of Petrograd, and men and women, with blinking eyes and tears of joy streaming down their faces, marched into the free world. Mikhailoff brought me back to the moment. “Listen! The bells--it’s the Gospodi pomilui [Lord save me],” he said. “It was the chimes that almost drove us mad. The monotony of them--the terrible regularity!” We stood still till the sound died away, then passed indoors to a crowded waiting-room. The place was dirty, and the air foul. The floor was littered with cigarette stubs, and heaped on a table in one corner was a strangely assorted pile of paper bundles of food, brought by relatives for the prisoners.