They were marching, most of them, in ordered lines across the street,
arm in arm, singing the "Marseillaise."

Very different from the procession a few weeks before. That had been
dumb, cowed, bewildered. This was the movement of a people conscious of
their freedom, sure of themselves, disdaining the world. Everywhere
bands were playing, banners were glittering, and from the very heart of
the soil, as it seemed, the "Marseillaise" was rising.

Although the sun only shone at brief intervals, there was a sense of
spring warmth in the air. For some time I could not cross the street,
then I broke through and almost ran down the deserted stretch of the
Canal. I arrived almost breathless at the door in the English Prospect.
There I found Sacha watching the people and listening to the distant
bands.

"Sacha!" I cried, "is Alexei Petrovitch at home?"

"No, Barin," she answered, looking at me in some surprise. "He went out
about a quarter of an hour ago."

"And Nicholas Markovitch?"

"He went out just now."

"Did he tell you where he was going?"

"No, Barin, but I heard Alexei Petrovitch tell him, an hour back, that
he was going to Katerinhof."

I did not listen to more. I turned and went. Katerinhof was a park, ten
minutes distant from my island; it was so called because there was there
the wooden palace of Katherine the Great. She had once made it her place
of summer residence, but it was now given over to the people and was,
during the spring and summer, used by them as a kind of fair and
pleasure-garden. The place had always been to me romantic and
melancholy, with the old faded wooden palace, the deserted ponds, and
the desolate trees. I had never been there in the summer. I don't know
with what idea I hurried there. I can only say that I had no choice but
to go, and that I went as though I were still continuing my dream of the
morning.

Great numbers of people were hurrying there also. The road was thronged,
and many of them sang as they went.

Looking back now it has entirely a dream-like colour. I stepped from the
road under the trees, and was at once in a world of incredible fantasy.
So far as the eye could see there were peasants; the air was filled with
an indescribable din. As I stepped deeper into the shelter of the
leafless trees the colour seemed, like fluttering banners, to mingle and
spread and sway before my eyes. Near to me were the tub-thumpers now so
common to us all in Petrograd--men of the Gr