Looking back now it has entirely a dream-like colour.  I stepped from the road under the trees, and was at once in a world of incredible fantasy.  So far as the eye could see there were peasants; the air was filled with an indescribable din.  As I stepped deeper into the shelter of the leafless trees the colour seemed, like fluttering banners, to mingle and spread and sway before my eyes.  Near to me were the tub-thumpers now so common to us all in Petrograd—­men of the Grogoff kind stamping and shouting on their platforms, surrounded by open-mouthed soldiers and peasants.

Here, too, were the quacks such as you might see at any fair in Europe—­quack dentists, quack medicine-men, men with ointments for healing sores, men with pills, and little bottles of bright liquid, and tricks for ruptures and broken legs and arms.  A little way beyond them were the pedlars.  Here were the wildest men in the world.  Tartars and Letts and Indians, Asiatics with long yellow faces, and strange fellows from Northern Russia.  They had everything to sell, bright beads and looking-glasses and little lacquered trays, coloured boxes, red and green and yellow, lace and silk and cloths of every colour, purple and crimson and gold.  From all these men there rose a deafening gabble.

I pressed farther, although the crowd now around me was immense, and so I reached the heart of the fair.  Here were enormous merry-go-rounds, and I had never seen such glittering things.  They were from China, Japan, where you will.  They were hung in shining, gleaming colours, covered with tinsel and silver, and, as they went tossing round, emitting from their hearts a wild barbaric wail that may have been, in some far Eastern city, the great song of all the lovers of the world for all I know, the colours flashed and wheeled and dazzled, and the light glittered from stem to stem of the brown silent trees.  Here was the very soul of the East.  Near me a Chinaman, squatting on his haunches, was showing before a gaping crowd the exploits of his trained mice, who walked up and down little crimson ladders, poked their trembling noses through holes of purple silk, and ran shivering down precipices of golden embroidery.  Near to him two Japanese were catching swords in their mouths, and beyond them again a great number of Chinese were tumbling and wrestling, and near to them again some Japanese children did little tricks, catching coloured balls in wooden cups and turning somersaults.

Around all these a vast mass of peasants pushed and struggled.  Like children they watched and smiled and laughed, and always, like the flood of the dream, their numbers seemed to increase and increase....

The noise was deafening, but always above the merry-go-rounds and the cheap-jacks and the shrill screams of the Japanese and the cries of the pedlars I heard the chant of the “Marseillaise” carried on high through the brown leafless park.  I was bewildered and dazzled by the noise and the light.  I turned desperately, pushing with my hands as one does in a dream.