00 refugees daily at
Petrograd, Moscow, Minsk, and at several small towns close to the front.

[Sidenote: The Petrograd "Feeding Point."]

[Sidenote: Sheds for shelter.]

The Petrograd "Feeding Point" is a long, hastily built shed of
unfinished lumber a stone's-throw from the Warsaw station. This site was
well selected, for the long stone railway station, open at both ends
like an aviation hangar, is the center of refugee population in the
Czar's city. Not only were several hundred homeless men, women, and
children sleeping on the cold stone floors of the draughty station, but
other hundreds were lying about in odd corners here and there, in empty
trucks and freight cars, lying within a few feet of where the crowded
refugee train had left them, with no hope or ambition to make them move
on. Still other hundreds, more fortunate than these, were sheltered in
three sheds, similar to the "Refugees' Restaurant" in their unfinished
board construction, which had been built by the Government. Each of
these sheds, about thirty by sixty feet in dimensions, housed between
two and three hundred persons. This crowding was made possible by the
presence of platforms built one above another in triple or quadruple
deck "nests" about the room, where people of both sexes and of all ages
slept, cooked and ate such food as they could beg, and lay all day long
with expressionless, bulging eyes, half stupefied in the stifling stench
of the place.

[Sidenote: Lines before the feeding stations.]

Twice a day a line formed before the door of the feeding station of such
persons as were known to have no private food supply, and when the door
opened they surged in, getting brass tickets at the threshold which each
one exchanged in the far end of the room for a large square piece of
Russian _chorny khleb_--black bread--and a steaming bowl of good old
English porridge served to them by the bustling ladies of the British
Colony. Only enough were admitted at a time to fill the double row of
board tables, yet every day from 1,000 to 1,400 were fed.

[Sidenote: The gayety of hungry youth.]

It was interesting to stand at the elbow of the buxom, indefatigably
good-natured English lady who wielded the porridge spoon and watch the
long, hungry file which melted away toward the tables when it reached
the tall, bottomless urn that held the fragrant, steaming cereal. First
came a dozen boys and girls who had lost their parents but not the
irresistible