What a peerless jewel was this cathedral, more beautiful even than Notre Dame in Paris, more open to the light, more ethereal, more soaringly uplifted with its columns like long reeds surprisingly fragile considering the weight they bear, a miracle of the religious art of France, a masterpiece which the faith of our ancestors had called into being in all its mystic purity.
Pierre Loti.
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION[ToC]
The controller, as he is called on the Siberian railroad, was passing through the cars to see that every passenger had a ticket. He did not notice the mooshik, which is what the Russian peasant is called in his own language, hiding under one of the car seats with a large bundle in front of him; or if he saw him, he passed on without seeming to have done so.
The mooshik had given the brakeman a small sum of money, about fifty cents in our currency, to let him hide there whenever the controller came around, and in this way ride from Petrograd, or Petersburg as the Bolsheviki renamed it after the revolution, to Vladivostok, a distance of about four thousand miles.
Now this mooshik did not need to go to Vladivostok; but his Russian nature made him go, go somewhere, it made little difference where. He had been the year before to Jerusalem, but this was for religious reasons, and now he must go again for no reason except that from within came the impulse to travel, an impulse too strong to be denied. The Russian government did not attempt to discourage the people from traveling, but actually made it easier by fixing fares for long distances at very small amounts. This traveler did not have even that small amount, but he found it easy with a smaller one to bribe his way in Russia.