of his way to oblige me and other English correspondents more than once. One of his supporters was a distinguished Irish lawyer who had a large practice extend ing over a wide stretch of the country. It was to this Irishman at dinner in the hotel one evening that I conveyed the fact that I had on that day, at Achill Island, tasted" poteen," the illicit Irish whisky, colorless as water and with strength enough to fell an ox. In his kindness, he promised to secure for me a couple of bottles and send them to my residence in London. It was too delightful an opportunity to break the law for me to refuse. A few weeks later in London a package was delivered at my house containing one bottle of "poteen" and the remains of another bottle which had been broken in transit. I wrote and

ONE

thanked the Irish lawyer for his kindness, mentioning incidentally the accident to one of the bottles. He wrote me back a kindly note which ran something like this: "I am sorry that one of the bottles was broken in transit, but as I have today successfully defended a man charged with manufacturing this commodity, I shall probably be able to send you another bottle by the end of the week."

It was at Westport that I learned how small a thing is mighty England to the remote parts of Ireland. I was shown a local paper dated the day after the coronation of King Edward in Westminster Abbey, an event which naturally occupied great prominence and a very large amount of space in all the English papers. This Irish journal dealt with it in a manner which presumably fully met the curiosity

"BABUSHKA"

for news on the part of its subscribers. This was the full description which was printed: "The King of England was crowned yesterday at Westminster."

It was only in the public meetings and the newspapers that I found harsh expressions towards England, and, to tell the truth, even these were nothing like so bitter as a stranger might have expected. There was at the time a general expectation of early Home Rule, which perhaps accounted to some extent for the mildness of the talk I heard. It did not account for the geniality of the Irish towards Englishmen in person, for that is and always was a feature of the country. In England an individual Irishman is always a favorite, which is a tribute not so much to the English as to the Irish themselves.

NE blue, moonlit Sunday evening, bitterly cold, last February, a great crowd surged into the Church of the Ascension in New York. Long before its chimes and those of its neighbor churches had stilled their sweet, clamorous call to evening service every pew was filled, the little yard outside was packed, the sidewalk overflowed into the roadways. Across the street there were more people gathered, and around the corner and up the steps of the Ascension Parish House human beings were waiting in dense formation, hopeful for a miracle, hopeful that the granite walls might become as crystal and that they might see the sight within, or that at last it would be demonstrated how two or ten-bodies might occupy the same space at the same time. Failing that, they waited for the satisfaction of their craving to behold the cause of their presence there when she came out again. Not since the last marriage of an American millionaire's daughter to a foreign nobleman had such a scene been witnessed in the vicinity of a New York church. This time the curiosity was more creditable to our democracy.

It was to see a woman that they were there-an old woman, a plain woman, a woman who fifty years ago gave up the husband and son whom she loved, her family and friends, and the luxuries to which she had been accustomed, because there had sounded in her heart the trumpet call to a great service. They were there, those crowding New Yorkers, to catch, if they might, a glimpse of Catherine Breshkovsky, "Babushka," the Little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution. They were there to pay tribute, the tribute at least of eager curiosity, to an old woman who had spent nearly half her whole long life and more than half her adult life in penal servitude. They were there, the most conservative of them, to acclaim a

BY ANNE O'HAGAN

radical, a rebel against an established order of tyranny, injustice, and cruelty. They were there, stepping from their comfortably padded, warmed limousines, comfortably padded, warmed limousines, many of them, to honor an old woman who in her youth had traveled uncounted miles on foot to incite revolution among peasants, who had been jolted between jailers in a springless wagon along that Via Dolorosa, the great Siberian road. They were there, those comfortable landowning people, to cheer an old woman who believed--and believes-that the land must belong to the workers of the land. and that the state must be the guardian of the workers' ownership, an old woman who told the Senate of the United States quite as a matter of course that she had been for fifty years a Socialist.

It was an amazing demonstration, a demonstration of the unity that underlies all diversities. For all of them-for the extremist who quarrels with what he regards as her old-fashioned present attitude and for the reactionary who still manages to cherish a quaint belief in a Socialist as something horned and hoofed, for both of them and for all betweenBabushka stands for something in which they can believe. Every day of her stay Every day of her stay in this country has witnessed a demonstration akin to that one.

Those who succeeded in entering the Church of the Ascension saw this sightan old woman, still strong, still vital, unbroken by years, unbroken by hardship. Her chest is deep, her shoulders broad, her neck powerful. Her face is still full and unshriveled. Her gray eyes look clearly, kindly, humorously, youth fully, upon the world in which they have witnessed such varied cruelties without

ever losing belief in fundamental kindness. Only when she reads or writes does she mount silver-rimmed spectacles. Her

gray hair is cut short and brushed back from a forehead as majestic as one of our own elder statesmen's. Her black sacklike dress, with the little white collar rolling over the top of it, makes elegance seem tawdry.

At home I was trying to describe the impression her appearance made upon me when a soft voice from the County Clare broke in upon me.

"Is it the old Russian lady you're talking of, ma'am?" it asked, excitedly. "I saw her I mean the picture of herat the movies the other night. She was coming ashore from the boat. She had on a white hood, a sort of cap, like what the old ladies at home in Ireland wear. I thought"-the voice ended wistfully"she looked like an old Irish lady."

I saw at once that she does look like an old Irish lady. She looks like an old Swedish lady. She looks like the embodiment of all the wisdom and all the kindness of all the wise, kind old women of the world. The "Grandmother" of that Russian Revolution once acclaimed by all of us, for we are ourselves the offspring of a revolution; the "Grandmother" of four million Russian orphans, to plead for whom she, a woman of seventy-five, has crossed continents and seas-when one sees her, with her great benignancy, her strength, her wit, her humor, one must believe that she is to be the "Grandmother" of a new, peaceful, happy Russia. She is a woman whose story will live in thousands of human hearts when the name

of Romanoff is as dead as that of Ptolemy.

Grandmothers of course do not continuously approve the ways of their grandchildren. What! Have the little people for whom grandma used to carry cookies in her pockets and to whom she sang Old World lullabies-have these dear little people grown up into these roisterers, these advanced young women with bobbed

hair and abbreviated codes of convention, these various objectionable types? What! Has the little fellow to whom grandpa used to tell tales of Washington and Valley Forge actually dared to become a Jabor agitator, a pacifist, a spouter about industrial democracy? So it happens with all grandparents. How much more so with the grandmother whose revolution was the child of such almost unbelievable effort, suffering, and heroism on her part? The Bolshevist Russia of to-day Madame Breshkovsky vehemently disowns as her child and that of the old revolutionists.

The day after that cold Sunday night it was my privilege to ride with her on her trip to Boston. I handed her various questions which she had been obliged to leave unanswered the night before. "How stupid such persons are!" she cried when I handed her this one: "Do you think that the Bolsheviki are sincere and that their only purpose is to give to the poorer class in Russia what rightfully belongs to them ?”

"How stupid such persons are! Have I not already said again and again that. I think the Bolsheviki traitors to the Revolution, traitors to Russia?" She spoke impatiently, but even in her impatience there is something piquant, something eternally young; it is not the peevish, impotent impatience of the aged.

I am not, alas! going to be able to make Babushka speak for you with_the charm that her speaking has. Her English, which when heard from a platform is so difficult to follow, is very attractive in conversation. She learned it-think of it!-out of books while she was in prison. She enunciates all the syllables, she gives each "r" its rolling, foreign value. The family, for example, will never be "dissol-ved;" it will always be "con-ser-ved." At the end of the sentence she is apt to breathe a little "yes." It is like a period, ike a falling inflection, but it has a touch of music in it like the lingering vibration of the last note played on the piano.

She was in Siberia, where she had spent so many years of her life, when the Revolution came. She describes her release and her triumphal return to Petrograd and Moscow. Kerensky had sent a special order that she should not only be freed but that she should have comforts. Another well-known revolutionist sent her money for her trip home. She hired horses and drove three hundred versts to the railway. She got a good train. The officials of the road gave her a beautiful car for herself. In it she, who had traveled to Siberia between jailers, dwelt, traveled, and received the acclamations of her fellow-countrymen. Twenty thou sand soldiers met her train at its first stop. She stayed at this place two days and spoke at the forums, the schools, and the colleges. When she went back to the train, soldiers lined the two miles between the hotel and the station, standing at attention as the Little Grandmother of the Revolution passed by in her carriage.

In Petrograd and Moscow, however, she found, when the first blaze of happiness had died down, that the spirit of the

young people of the intelligentsia was not what it had been. Not only had the Government executed and exiled many of the leaders of the revolution of 1905, and thereby both destroyed a certain quality of leadership and intimidated thought, but schools, colleges, organizations, were under stricter rule than ever before. Parents, too, had come to be afraid to have their children think too much, learn too much. She found the new generation -or so she thought-more selfish and more frivolous than the old. The intellectual young men and women were bent upon making their own careers; the less intellectual were absorbed in easy pleasures-in the movies, in skating, in reading light novels; "in foolishness," says Babushka, with a piquant hissing of s's and a half-humorous frown. Still, for the first weeks after her return she journeyed about.freely, trying to rouse among the weaklings some of the fervor of enthusi asm with which she was so richly endowed. Among her peasants, among the "dark people" whom she so understands and loves and by whom she is so adored, she found a different and a better spirit.

It happened that her return to Petrograd from her journey through the country coincided with the overthrow of the Kerensky Government. She was met by Kerensky Government. She was met by friends who wanted her to go into hiding. All the Government ministers were reported to be under arrest, "except Babushka." With the aid of loyal friends, she remained hidden for six weeks, during which she wrote articles for the "Will of the People "-signed articlesbut the Bolsheviki were unable to find out from what asylum she put them forth. And then when Petrograd became too dangerous she was spirited away to Moscow with other sympathizers of the Kerensky Government. How did she manage it?

"Ah, my child, that is a secret. All my life I have moved around in Russia, and no one has known how. I am an old revolutionist. Old revolutionists do not tell these things."

For more than six months Babushka remained in Moscow, hidden in two rooms with another revolutionist, a woman with whom she had been convicted forty-five years ago. Kerensky, as wise, apparently, in the secret ways of revolutionists as the two old women, eventually joined them there. While the newspapers were announcing his presence in London or Switzerland he was spending May and June in Moscow with Madame Breshkovsky and planning with her the organization of the Resurrection of Russia Society.

Shortly after Kerensky left Moscow Madame Breshkovsky and others of the old revolutionists went through the Volga region organizing their new society, organizing opposition to the Bolsheviki.

66

be too hard. I had not been there for twenty-two years, and all the people were unknown to me. My situation became dangerous. What should I do? I decided to go and see the medical staff. A medical staff would be civilized. My foot was hurting me--I would see the doctor and find out if she was sympathetic. So I went to the woman physician, and as soon as I began to speak I saw that she was suspicious. She went to the telephone, and when she came back she said that I had better stay in her hospital, and that if I had any other 'sick' friends they had better come too. Thus we were saved. Five days afterwards a servant came into the room and told us that the Bolsheviki were running out of the town. After nightfall the Czechoslovaks came to the village, and we were free. The peasants came to us with bread and meat. There was dancing and music and a great festival. Again I had escaped."

In Babushka's eyes, while she was recounting her latest adventures, there was life and fire-enjoyment. Would she have missed something out of her home-coming if there had been no threatened danger, no underground messages, no hairbreadth escapes?

Not all of the charges current against the Bolsheviki, however, does she admit. The tale that made the blood of the women of America run hot and coldthat tale of "nationalization" of women --she laughed at with the impatient good nature of one who hates to be stopped in her war against real things to deliver a blow at imaginary ones.

"No!" she shook her leonine head vehemently, "nothing like that. Trust the Russian peasant for that! No, there is no such regulation. Some time, some places, maybe, bad peoples make badnesses. That is all. The Russian peasant, he will have his own wife, his own children. And in Russia, you know, almost all are peasants.'

This wonderful old woman, who, to become grandmother to a whole nation, gave up her own family, believes in the family as fervently as any Italian peasant woman who knows no life beyond the young life in her arms and tugging at her skirts. No misgivings as to its stability in the new world order troubles her. She believes that its roots are in the very nature of the human race; she believes in the love of man for one mate, of a woman for one mate, believes that the happiness and glory of a woman are her children-" many, many children." And she opens her arms wide to give some measure of the abounding motherliness which she believes inherent in us.

It is for the children of Russia that she is here, and not primarily, as perhaps it has sometimes seemed for a minute or two, as a witness against the present rule in her own country. All her public speeches are for the four million children whom the war has orphaned in Russia. She is begging America to send, out of its riches, everything to these children. Not money merely, though money of course will be necessary. She wants

teachers, nurses, women doctors, settlement workers. She wants books. She wants instructors-men and women of every sort of craft and art as well as in book learning. In every city, near every town and village, she would have established a settlement where the orphan children of the district, to the number, perhaps, of five hundred or so, might be gathered together and taught taught everything, kindness, truth, sobriety, industry, as well as the A B C's and all that follows after them. She wants to arouse not only a fervor of generosity, but the passion for service among our young men and women. We send missionaries out to the waste places of the earth, she says. Why not send missionaries to the Russian orphans? It will not be easy service. The comforts which surround American workers at home will be utterly lacking, but, even at that, conditions will not be what they are in Senegambia or Timbuctoo, and the reward of the service would be enougha vital part in the building up, in the salvation, of a great nation.

She tells about the orphans as they are now. Some of them are in homes already overcrowded, already impoverished. Many are running wild upon the streets of the cities. They are beggars; they are what Babushka quaintly calls "speculators." By that she means little boys who buy packages of cigarettes or bundles of papers or what not and, by the aid of whining, cajolery, or petty thievery, endeavor to dispose of them again at a profit. Before the tremendous and immediate importance of this problem of the future of the war orphans of Russia even the settlement of Russia's political problems may well wait.

I tried to interest her in the political

situation. I asked her if the state to which she looked forward in Russia after the present turmoil had quieted was a democracy of our sort. She answered briefly but convincingly. The state to which she looked forward-the state which she declares to be in existence now except for the civil war precipitated by those whom she regards as traitors-is not merely our democratic state, it is a Socialist state. There would be no buying or selling of land; land would belong to the people, and the state would insure each man his possession of his own piece. There would be absolute religious and political equality; there would be industrial democracy in so far as Russia is an industrial country. But Madame Breshkovsky does not forget to remind her interlocutor that Russia is still overwhelmingly an agricultural, instead of an industrial, country. She believes of course in the convening of a national assembly. The absolute equality of women is, naturally, axiomatic with this fine old revolutionist. She smilingly declares that women have in Russia a large measure of equality. The schools and professions have been open to the girls of the intelligentsia as well as to the boys; and among the working people certainly no inequality in labor prevails. "And sometimes," she

with says,

twinkle, "a wife will beat her husband. Yes."

I asked her how it was that she, a woman of seventy-five, who had endured long years of the most cruel hardship and oppression, had come out of them with a vigor of mind and body which put to shame that of sheltered women of half her age. I wish that it were possible for me to give her answer in her own exact words, in her own voice, so that I could make you see her musing eyes as she looked at the bright wintry landscape flashing by outside the Pullman window. By the way, Madame Breshkovsky finds it "always a festival" to ride in the train in America and look out of the car window.

When I put that question to her about the power that kept her young and vigorand vigorous, she thought for a moment; she dreamed.

"I had," she said," a happy childhood. Yes. As a child all went well with me. My father and my mother, they were good people. Strong of body, just in their minds, kind in their hearts. Never was there a base word spoken, never a base thing done. We lived on an estate in the country and my mother herself taught us. We were not allowed to be idle. Always there was occupation for us-our books, our piano, our drawing, our embroidery. Always we were taught to be kind. Sometimes people would come to see us-simple people, plain people, poor people. We children would be sent to entertain them. Sometimes we would protest. We would complain. We did not want to go. We were doing something else. But always my mother made us go and entertain these poor people, teaching us to be courteous and hospitable. Well, as I grew older the teaching stayed in my heart and it grew to be a bigger thing. I gathered the children of the peasants on the estate together. I had a little school. I taught them. From the time I was seventeen until I was twenty-five I did this work. And thenthen it was all stopped. I was not permitted to teach my peasants or to try to help them."

Thus the repression of a liberal movement became, as usual, the signal for the growth of a radical movement. The young woman, stopped in her kindly educa tional work, was inevitably drawn into the revolutionary movement. She had had three brothers and three sisters. Had any of them joined her?

"One sister, one only, was a-what do you call it? An idealist, like me. The others, the other brothers and sisters, they were very good people. My sister, the one I tell you of, died when she was twenty-six. The others lived and were, as I say, very good people-very honest, very upright, harming no person, letting no person harm them. But not like me and my sister. Not idealists."

She struggled to convey her idea yet more clearly to me. Her face brightened. "Good people, like the English," she finally epitomized her kinsfolk. “But I kept on with my revolutionary work. My

mother has told me that she hoped I a would be a boy. When I was little, I used

sometimes to feel angered, hurt, that my mother should have wished me to be not myself, but a boy. But now I sometimes think that maybe all those months she hoped I was going to be a boy gave me something strong, something inflexible, so that I did not bend before hardship and difficulty; so that I could be truly a revolutionist. Maybe the heart of the girl that longed to do things would not have been enough but for that other thing that my mother put into me, those months when she was wishing me to be a boy."

She mused again upon the mystery of life and purpose and temperament. Then she came back.

"In my mother's sitting-room," she told me, "there was a book. I used to look at the pictures before I had learned to read. Afterwards when I could read I read it again and again. It was the story of a young girl in Rome. Barbara was her name. She was the daughter of a noble, but she became a convert to Christianity-St. Barbara. Well, her father was building a great, beautiful marble bath, and one day Barbara went in to see it. There were but two windows. She asked the workmen why they had not made three. They answered her that her father had ordered only two. She bade them put in a third window, that each person in the Trinity might have due honor. By and by she persuaded them. When her father discovered the third window, he asked the workmen why they had made it. They told him that his daughter Barbara had so ordered. He asked her why. She told him that she was a Christian, and that God was three persons in one, and that therefore she had wanted the three windows made. He bade her to recant, and she would not. He ordered her flogged. There was a picture in the book in my mother's sitting-room that showed that lovely young Roman girl enduring it to be flogged. She did not recant. Her father ordered more tortures. Her breast was burned. She did not recant. Always, always, throughout my whole life, I have remembered that Roman girl who was so strong. Always when I remembered her I knew that I must never be weak. That book in my mother's room, my father and my mother who taught me to be kind, to be busy, to speak the truth-"

Babushka's wonderful eyes swam in tears as she brought them back to me from the flying landscape outside. "Sometimes, even now," she told 66 me, when I am hard pressed, or wavering, I still call to them. I remember the Roman girl who was so strong. I whisper to my parents: Father, mother, come and aid

me.

6

And there you have her, the dreaming idealist who has always held in her heart the vision of that lovely young Roman martyr; the woman of tenderest, devoutest family love; the heroic plotter. And what could be more touching than that at the end of so many years she should come back to the beginning-that she remembers her parents with loving fervor, that she works for her country's orphaned little ones?