If you do not hear from me after next Sunday you can put dad's obituary and mine in the local papers and say we died of an overdose of Cossack. If we get through this revolution alive you will hear from me, but this is the last revolution I am going to attend.
Dad Sees a Russian Revolution and Faints--The Bad Boy Arranges a Wolf Hunt--Dad Threatens to Throw the Boy to the Wolves.
St. Petersburg, Russia.--My Dear Grocery-witz: Well, sir, dad and I have got too much of Russia the quickest of any two tourists you ever heard of. That skirmish we saw, the day the Russians blessed the Neva, and shot blank cartridges filled with old iron at the czar, was not a marker to the trouble the next Sunday, when the working people marched to the Winter Palace, to present a petition to the “Little Father.”
We thought a revolution was like a play, and that it would be worth going miles to see. Dad was in South America once when there was a revolution, where more than a dozen greasers, with guns that wouldn't shoot, put on a dozen different kinds of uniforms, and yelled: “Down with the government,” and frothed at the mouth, and drank buttermilk and yelled Spanish swear words, and acted brave, until a native soldier with white pajamas came out with a gun and shot one of the revolutionists in the thumb, when the revolution was suppressed and the next day the revolutionists were pounding stone, with cannon balls chained to their legs; and dad thought a revolution in Russia would be something like that, and that we could get on a front porch and watch it as it went by, and joke with the revolution, and throw confetti, like it was a carnival, but that Sunday that the Russian revolution was begun, we had enough blood to last us all our lives.
We got a place sitting on an iron picket fence, and we saw the people coming up the street towards the Winter Palace, dressed mostly in blouses, and looking as innocent as a crowd of sewer diggers at home going up to the city hall to ask for a raise in wages of two shillings a day. Nobody had a gun, and no one would have known how to use a gun, and all looked like poor people going to prayers. There were troops everywhere, and every soldier acted as though he was afraid something would happen to spoil their chance of killing anybody. The snow on the streets was clean and as white as the wings of a peace dove, and dad said the show was no better than a parade of laboring men at home on Labor day.