[Sidenote: The Petrograd "Feeding Point."]
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.
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 gayety of hungry youth in the presence of food.