The hush of impending events hung over the entire city. I remember nothing like that silence since the day the Germans entered Louvain. On every street were the bread lines longer than ever. All along the Catherine Canal, the snow was pounded by many feet and spotted with blood. But there were no soldiers and few police. We hurried along the Nevsky, gathering rumors of the fight that was actually going on down by the arsenal on the Litenie. But many shops were open and there was a semblance of business. All was so quiet we could not make out the meaning of a company of infantry drawn up in a hollow square commanding the four points at the junction of the Litenie and Nevsky, ordinarily one of the busiest corners in the world. [Sidenote: Cavalry commands arrive.] [Sidenote: The barricade on the Litenie.] [Sidenote: Haphazard rifle-fire.] But as soon as we turned down the Litenie we could hear shots farther down, and the pedestrians were mostly knotted in doorways. Scattered cavalry commands were arriving from the side streets, and the Litenie began looking a little too hot. So we chose a parallel street for several blocks until we were within three blocks of the Neva, where we had to cross the Litenie in front of a company drawn up across the street ready to fire toward the arsenal, where there was sporadic rifle fire. Here there were bigger knots of curious citizens projecting themselves farther and farther toward the middle of the street, hoping for a better view, until a nearer shot frightened them closer to the walls. The barricade on the Litenie by the arsenal, the one barricade the revolution produced, was just beginning to be built two hundred feet away as Lewis and I reached the shelter of the Fourshtatzkaya, on the same street as the American Embassy. By crossing the Litenie we had entered the zone of the revolutionists. We did not realize this, however, and were puzzled by the sight of a soldier carrying simply a bayonet, and another with a bare officer's sword. A fourteen-year-old boy stood in the middle of the street with a rifle in his hand, trifling with it. It exploded in his hand, and when he saw the ruin of the breech block he unfixed the bayonet, threw down the gun, and ran around the corner. A student came up the street examining the mechanism of a revolver. There seemed to be rifle-fire in every direction, even in the same street, but haphazard. [Sidenote: An officer recruiting for the revolution.]