elief to-day in the general distress and confusion. It
covered his personal disaster and forced him to forget himself in
other persons' misfortunes. He was, as it happened, of more use than
any one just then in getting every one speedily out of O----. He ran
messages, found parcels and bags for the Sisters, collected sanitars,
even discovered the mongrel terrier, tied a string to him and gave him
to one of our soldiers to look after. In what a confusion, as the
evening fell, was the garden of our large white house! Huge wagons
covered its lawn; horses, neighing, stamping, jumping, were dragged
and pulled and threatened; officers, from stout colonels to very young
lieutenants, came cursing and shouting, first this way and that. A
huge bag of biscuits broke away from a provision van and fell
scattering on to the ground; the soldiers, told that they might help
themselves, laughing and shouting like babies, fell upon the store.
But for the most part there was gloom, gloom, gloom under the evening
sky. Sometimes the reflections of distant rockets would shudder and
fade across the pale blue; incessantly, from every corner of the
world, came the screaming rattle of carts, a sound like many pencils
drawn across a gigantic slate--and always the dust rose and fell in
webs and curtains of filmy gold, under the evening sun.

At last Trenchard found himself with Molozov and Ivan Mihailovitch,
the student like a fish, in the old black carriage. Molozov had "flung
the world to the devil," Trenchard afterwards said, "and I sat there,
you know, looking at his white face and wondering what I ought to talk
about." Trenchard suddenly found himself narrowly and aggressively
English--and it is certain that every Englishman in Russia on Tuesday
thanks God that he is a practical man and has some common sense, and
on Wednesday wonders whether any one in England knows the true value
of anything at all and is ashamed of a country so miserably without a
passion for "ideas."

To-night Trenchard was an Englishman. He had been really useful at
O---- and he had felt a new spirit of kindness around him. He did not
know that Marie Ivanovna had made her declaration to us and that we
were therefore all anxious to show him that we thought that he had
been badly treated. Moreover he suspected, with a true English
distrust of emotions, that the Russians before him were inclined to
luxuriate in their gloom. Molozov's despair and Ivan Mihailovitch's
passiona