The Poles are a race of burning patriots.  To-day they are as keen over national sufferings and national wrongs as on that unfortunate clay when they went into a fiercely unwilling and resentful captivity.  Their pride, their courage, their bitterness of spirit, their longing for revenge now no longer find an outlet on the battlefield.  Yet it smoulders continually in their innermost being.  You must crush the heart, you must subdue a people, you must be no stranger to anguish and loss if you would discover the singer and the song.  And so Poland’s fierce and unrelenting patriotism has placed the divine spark of a genius which thrills a world in souls whose sweetest song is a cry wrung from a patriot’s heart.

VI

ST. PETERSBURG

It behooves one to be good in Russia, for no matter how excellent your reputation at home, no matter how long you have been a member in good and regular standing of the most orthodox church, no matter how innocent your heart may be of anarchy, nihilism, or murder, you travel, you rest, you eat, sleep, wake, or dream, tracked by the Russian police.

They snatch your passport the moment you arrive at a hotel, and register you, and if you change your hotel every day, every day your passport is taken, and you are requested to fill out a blank with your name, age, religion, nationality, and the name and hotel of the town where you were last.

When we entered our Russian hotel—­when we had entirely entered, I mean, for we passed through six or eight swinging doors with moujiks to open and shut each one, and bow and scrape at our feet—­we found ourselves in a stiflingly hot corridor, where the odor was a combination of smoke and people whose furs needed airing.

It would be an excellent idea if Americans who live in cold climates dressed as sensibly as Russians do.  They keep their houses about as warm as we keep ours, but they wear thin clothing indoors and put on their enormous furs for the street.  On entering any house, church, shop, or theatre, the chuba and overshoes are removed, and although they spend half their lives putting them on and taking them off, yet the other half is comfortable.

The women seem to have no pride about the appearance of their feet, for now the doctors are ordering them to wear the common gray felt boot of the peasants, with the top of it reaching to the knee.  It is without doubt the most hideous and unshapely object the mind can conceive, being all made of one piece and without any regard to the shape of the foot.

St. Petersburg can hardly be called a typical Russian city.  It is too near other countries, but to us, before we had seen Moscow and Kiev, it was Russia itself.  We arrived one bitterly cold day, and went first to the hotel to which we had been recommended by our friends.

I shall never forget the wave of longing for home and country which settled down upon me as we saw our rooms in this hotel.  It must have been built in Peter the Great’s time.  No electric lights; not even lamps.  Candles!  Now, if there is one thing more than another which makes me frantic with homesickness, it is the use of candles.  I would rather be in London on Sunday than to dress by the light of candles.