Gee, I hope dad will not get killed here and be buried in a trench with a thousand Russians, smelling as they do.
I met a young man from Chicago, who is here selling reapers for the harvester trust, and he says if you are once suspected of having sympathy with the working people who are on a strike you might just as well say your prayers and take rough on rats, 'cause the Cossacks will get you, and he would advise me and dad to get out of here pretty quick, but when I told dad about it he put one hand on his heart and the other on his pants and said “Arnica, arnica, arnica!” and the police that were on guard near his room thought he meant anarchy, and they sent four detectives to stay in dad's room.
The people here, the Chicago young man told me, think the Cossacks are human hyenas, that they have had their hearts removed by a surgical operation when young, and a piece of gizzard put in in place of the heart, and that they are natural murderers, the sight of blood acting on them the same as champagne on a human being, and that but for the Cossacks Russia would have a population of loving subjects that would make it safe for the Little Father to go anywhere in Russia unattended, but with Cossacks ready to whip and murder and laugh at suffering, the people are becoming like men bitten by rabid dogs, and they froth at the mouth and have spasms and carry bombs up their sleeves, ready to blow up the members of the royal family, and there you are.
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.
Yours,
Hennery.
CHAPTER XXI.
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.”