The officer betrayed his impatience. We handed him our American passports--which we naïvely thought would be sufficient to induce him to respect us. At that time I had not yet learned that in the heart of Russia to be an American citizen means no more than to belong to one of the tribes of the Iroquois Indians. We were possessed of other credentials in addition to our passports, however, and these were finally accepted, though with evident reluctance. During the examination, our student-hosts sat nonchalantly by, smoking cigarettes. The ceremony was familiar enough to them. Their quarters were searched by this same officer and his men sometimes two or three times a week, and any book, pamphlet, or piece of handwriting that he took a fancy to declare “dangerous” was confiscated. When the officer and his ten soldiers withdrew we [Illustration: The peasants’ friend] [Illustration: Medical students from Moscow University in charge of a famine relief station in Saratoff] could hear other feet outside the window. Curiosity prompted me to look out, so we unbarred the shutter and let the lamp-light flood the yard. Thirty more brown-coated soldiers were drawn up in two phalanxes. Later we wondered, my companion and I, why this search officer brought forty soldiers with him. Thirty-six hours later, when we were really arrested and carried off to prison, the work was done by one police officer and one rural guard. Toward midnight we rolled ourselves in our blankets and lay down on the floor to sleep. This is the common thing in peasants’ houses. The children and the very old sleep over the square, brick stove, on a little platform designed for the purpose, but the rest of the family, and strangers, are content with the floor. All that night we heard the slow tread of feet outside the windows. Two soldiers were keeping guard. Not till the larks had been up an hour in the adjoining fields, and day was fairly come, did these sentinels retire. Early next morning peasants from the village began to wait upon us. We were friends of their friends and that was enough. They unbared the hardness of their lives with perfect freedom. One old man told us that he had been in jail no less than eight times because he had repeatedly volunteered to carry to the Czar--their “Little Father”--the petition of the village setting forth their wrongs. It seemed still to be the firm belief of these peasants that their condition was as it was because the Czar had never come to know of their plight. It was a striking fact throughout Russia that often among the most revolutionary peasants there was even down to the spring of 1906 strong loyalty to the Czar. Their revolt was against the government hedged round the Czar, and barring the “Little Father” from his people. The first Duma dispelled this belief almost universally, but the first Duma was, at this time, a month away.