I soon met Pavel Potapof, the local headman, and I talked in Russian with a number of men and women who spoke no other language. They were raising wheat for themselves and for their wheatless brethren who live in the lumbering camps and villages of British Columbia, but represent a sort of a half-way colony between the original Verigin, Saskatchewan, and the main settlement of Brilliant, British Columbia. Potapof was a boy at Cyprus, where his father enjoyed some authority. He is now a man in his thirties with brown moustache and close-clipped chin. If you are a Dukhobor you may not shave but you may clip with the shears. He remembered touching a Mr. St. John at Cyprus, who used to call him Pavlushka. Potapof spoke Russian with a soft Little-Russian accent, all g’s being h’s. He came from Tiflis province, and I talked first of the Caucasus, comparing them with the Rockies. Then naturally we discussed Russia, and a curious crowd gathered about us. Scarcely any spoke English--all were Russian subjects, and I much wondered what they thought of the Bolshevik revolution. For they also are Communists. I soon learned that an appeal had been made to them on behalf of the Bolsheviks to help to stem the famine in Russia. Some of the Dukhobors were for sending grain, some not. They blamed the Bolsheviks for their “two million men under arms.” Most of them said: “Let those who are richer in Russia give to those who are poorer; there’ll be enough to go round.” Imagination did not show them the ghastly ruin of contemporary Russia, where, except for a handful of Soviet commissaries, there are no rich, no “better-off” people. Most of them also said: “Let them lay down their arms, and then we’ll think of feeding them.” But their deliberations crystallised in the following way. They decided on a symbolic act. They visited all their Ruthenian and Galician neighbours and any one who had a war-trophy to spare, and they made thus a collection of rifles, shotguns, pistols--some three hundred or more weapons. These they burned in a heap. Then they sent a wireless message to the Russian people describing this act, and added further the monition: “Do likewise; burn your rifles, and return to work!” “They murdered Nikolai (rubili Nikolai) and his family for liberty,” said Potapof. “But now clearly there is much less liberty than ever there was before.” Nevertheless I thought I detected a curious home-sickness among many of them. The violent rumours and persistent bad news of Russia comes to a primitive community that cannot read in a more disturbing and dramatic way than through newspapers. They complained sadly of conditions in Canada; of droughts, of plagues of grasshoppers, of bygone hardships and persecutions in Saskatchewan. “Here there will be a Bolshevik revolution too,” said one. “We shall not take part in it. But we know it is preparing. There is much discontent in the neighbouring settlements and in the mines. Oh yes, there is trouble brewing here too.”