The delay here was characteristically tedious. Hours were consumed in despatching business which after all was slight in bulk, but unduly weighted by red tape. Aside from the “dangerous” literature which was securely fastened about my body, I had nothing dutiable, so I thought I could safely expedite the examination for myself in order that I might be an unharassed spectator on this, my first, Russian scene. To accomplish this I innocently offered a Customs Inspector a small piece of silver, which was vehemently refused. Mr. Inspector informed me in a loud voice that he could not think of taking money from an individual for doing what the government paid him for doing. A moment later his back was turned, and a thin ugly hand stole between two of my grips and the half-closed fingers twitched expressively toward the palm. The man’s eyes were on his superior. I dropped a modest coin into his hand, and the same instant a Russian standing next me dropped a much larger coin--gold in fact--into the same palm. The man started in visible surprise and excitedly snapped shut my bags without so much as glancing at them. As he did so he muttered something to me under his breath, in Russian, which I could not understand, but my [Illustration: Moscow barricades] neighbor--he of the lavish tip--said, _sotto voce_: “Take two of my bags along with yours.” The meaning of this was not at the moment clear to me, but I meekly complied with the request, and ingenuously submitted the stranger’s grips to the checking officials as if they were my own. Had the man been an absolute stranger I might not have followed his directions so readily, but he was the same man who had showed me how to carry my book so as to escape detection. Not till the train had actually left the Wirballen station did the man come to claim his luggage. Then he lingered to talk awhile and we became friendly to the point of confidence. Darkness had settled deeply down over the outside world before he left my compartment, and we were running across wide, open fields occasionally broken by forests of fir, into which the engine belched bright sparks from the soft sticks that in Russia are burned instead of coal. My companion watched the sparks scattering against the trees and settling on either side of our steel pathway, and made some allusion to the sparks of liberty that even then were scattering across all Russia, settling around and in every town and village from the Baltic Sea to the waters of the Orient. The man’s eyes flashed, hardly less bright than the darting flecks of flame outside the window. He found a sympathetic listener, and it was then we warmed toward each other and he told me the contents of the bags that I, so innocently, had smuggled safely into the country. They contained hand-grenade models, phials of high explosives and several innocent Browning revolvers. I cannot say that I regretted then, or have I since, this, my first humble service to the revolution.