gather round foreign sailors, Chinese and others, and get amusement from their strange appearance : on at least two occasions I received a similar kind of attention from children in Moscow. Although dressed in a very long fur coat with a Russian cap, the children understood I was a stranger and so made of me a sort of post around which they slid, skated and tobogganed, chattering, laughing all the time, and, as I imagined, challenging me to talk. Every day during my stay the river Moskva was frozen over and thus became a playground covered at certain times and places with children, who appeared not merely capable of enjoyment, but easily able to enjoy themselves.
Under other and less favourable conditions, it was possible to see how children lived. At mid-day every day children by the hundred could be seen going to food centres and bread stores, waiting in long queues, sometimes for hours on end in bitterly cold weather : others were to be found in public restaurants getting their mid-day meals. Very few restaurants or food stores were as efficiently equipped or anything like as clean as in this country, and the long wait was a wearisome business.
In none of the children did I see a sign of depression or lack of mental or physical vigour. The most favourable conditions for seeing children were in the great theatres and
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