So, about half-past one, I started off for Bohun's office on the Fontanka. I've said somewhere before, I think, that Bohun's work was in connection with the noble but uphill task of enlightening the Russian public as to the righteousness of the war, the British character, and the Anglo-Russian alliance. I say "uphill," because only a few of the _real_ population of Russia showed the slightest desire to know anything whatever about any country outside their own. Their interest is in ideas not in boundaries--and what I mean by "real" will be made patent by the events of this very day. However, Bohun did his best, and it was not his fault that the British Government could only spare enough men and money to cover about one inch of the whole of Russia--and, I hasten to add, that if that same British Government had plastered the whole vast country from Archangel to Vladivostock with pamphlets, orators, and photographs it would not have altered, in the slightest degree, after events. To make any effect in Russia England needed not only men and money but a hundred years' experience of the country. That same experience was possessed by the Germans alone of all the Western peoples--and they have not neglected to use it. I went by tram to the Fontanka, and the streets seemed absolutely quiet. That strange shining Nevski of the night before was a dream. Some one in the tram said something about rifle-shots in the Summer Garden, but no one listened. As Vera had said last night we had, none of us, much faith in Russian revolutions. I went up in the lift to the Propaganda office and found it a very nice airy place, clean and smart, with coloured advertisements by Shepperson and others on the walls, pictures of Hampstead and St. Albans and Kew Gardens that looked strangely satisfactory and homely to me, and rather touching and innocent. There were several young women clicking away at typewriters, and maps of the Western front, and a colossal toy map of the London Tube, and a nice English library with all the best books from Chaucer to D.H. Lawrence and from the _Religio Medici_ to E.V. Lucas' _London_. Everything seemed clean and simple and a little deserted, as though the heart of the Russian public had not, as yet, quite found its way there. I think "guileless" was the adjective that came to my mind, and certainly Burrows, the head of the place--a large, red-faced, smiling man with glasses--seemed to me altogether too cheerful and pleased with life to penetrate the wicked recesses of Russian pessimism. I went into Bohun's room and found him very hard at work in a serious, emphatic way which only made me feel that he was playing at it. He had a little bookcase over his table, and I noticed the _Georgian Book of Verse_, Conrad's _Nostromo_, and a translation of Ropshin's _Pale Horse_. "Altogether too pretty and literary," I said to him; "you ought to be getting at the peasant with a pitchfork and a hammer--not admiring the Intelligentzia."