This train in which I am_ travelling would compare well with trains in England and America.
There are two engines, black and greasy, having huge funnel-shaped chimneys. They consume an enormous quantity of wood. But there is no scarcity of it, for at every station there are stacks of it sawn into convenient chunks.
At one end of the train is the post-waggon, with two brass horns ornamenting its outer panels and a green-painted letter box, bearing a picture of a sealed letter, hanging outside. At the other end is what approximates to our guard's van, where the conductor—a large, stout, mayorial gentleman in black military kind of frock coat, with a white and purple tassel on the shoulder—occupies much of his time drinking tea, though twice a day he makes a promenade of the entire train with a couple of supernumeraries, thinner men, to open and shut the doors for him.
All the other cars are for passengers. There is one car painted blue for first-class passengers, two painted yellow for second-class passengers, and seven painted green for third-class passengers. The cars are all built on the corridor plan, and as the gauge of the line is wide they are roomy.
The swagger people, like generals and their wives, Siberian millionaires, wealthy merchants, and English journalists. travel first class; second class is favoured by lesser military officers, wives and daughters going out to Siberia to join the head of the family who has his eye on becoming a millionaire, and also by men whom I take to be German commercial travellers.
But the majority are third class, a hig-gledy-piggeldy community of decent-looking artisans and their wives and hordes of children wandering east to settle, and a fair sprinkling of hamm-serum young fellows, always smoking cigarettes and diving into every buffet and shouting for "pavo" (beer), and making mock attempts to pitch one another out of the window. The mass, however, of my fellow-travellers are moujiks," shaggy men with big sheepskin hats that give them a ferocious air, wearing rough-spun cloaks, and often with sacking tied around their feet instead of boots. The women are fat, plain and barefooted, though the colours of their dresses are sometimes startling in brilliancy gaudy orange is popular. They, too, have hordes of youngsters, little bundles of unwashed rags, but plump and happy most of them.
The first-class car is divided into compartments where. if you are alone, you maintain privacy by turning the key. There are plush seats on either side, but as this is summer time they are covered with red-striped cotton. At night the car attendant comes in, touches a lever, and the back of the seat swings up and makes an upper berth. And the bottom sent turns on a pivct, comes bottom upwards and a pull at a cord reveals a soft mattress and pillow. The ideal way is to have a compartment to yourself and you get this in exactly the same way es ¥ou secure a carriage to yourself on an English train, railway attendants having the same weakness all the world orer. I have travelled the ideal way.
The lighting of the car in the evening is bad. A'single candle is stuck in a case over the door and this has not onl~ to luminate your compartment but. conti bute to lighting part of the corridor on the other side. It is impossible to read. The lavatory accomodation is limited, and as it is for the joint use of both sexes it is a cause of frequent embarrassments. Ablutions have to be performed singly. For two hours each morning there is a little crowd of unwashed, uncombed and semi-j dressed men and women standing about the corridor, all smoking cigarettes, women as well as men, and each eyeing their neighbour with side glances of distrust lest there will be some underhand move to get possession of the lavatory first.
Among the provoking things of life is the way Russian hotels and lavatories on Russian trains supply you with water, but there is a button which on pressing with your hand releases a trickle. The moment you cease pressing the button the snuply is cut off. When you are actually pressing the water trails along your elbow and soaks your shirt sleeves or douses your clothes and boots. I have been irritated beyond the verge of profanity. The only refuge is selfishness. So I plug the basin outlet with a cork and hold the button up with a lead pencil till the basin is full. Then I wash. Thus the water supply soon gives out and I pick up several swear-words in Russian from my fellows.
The second-class cars seem almost as good as the first. Ladies, or husbands and wives, or travellers who understand the weak side of railway attendants can, if there is not too much traffic, get a compartment. Otherwise the seats and beds are arranged without any cubicle di ion. On hot nights—and though Russi in winter can be colder than the North Pole, it can in summer be more torrid than the Eguator—tt is better to travel second class than first.
All the third-class cars are grimy; there are sections reserved for women and child-ten. The wood-work is painted drab inside, but there is not a vestige of cushion. [spent hours among these emigrants. I find them interesting. They are horribly dirty, and as they like to have the windows' closed d the temperature, the cars reek with odour. They carry all their worldly possessions with them: some foul sleeping rugs and some bundles of more foul clothing. Those are spread out on the hard seats to make them a little less hard. Bread, tea, and melons seem their chief fare. There are great chunks of sour black bread, and at every halt kettles are seized and a scramble made to the platform, where the local peasant women have steaming "samovars" and sell a kettleful of boiling water for a halfpenny, and.a water melon as big as your head for a pen-
Besides bread-eating, and scattering half of it on the floor, and munching melons, and making a mess with the tina and splashing the water about when tea-making, there is the constant smoking of cigarettes. A peasant may riot be able to afford a hunk of bread but he has a supply of cigarettes. They are tiny unsatisfying things. half cardboard tube, provide three modest puffs, and are then to be thrown away. You could smoke a hundred a day and deserve no lecture on being a slave to tobacco.
The emigrants are hapnv. Though the faces of the men are heavy and animal there is not much guile about them. The cars ring with their coarse laughter. Last night I visited them. At the end of each car was a candle flickering feebly. The place was all gaunt shadow. The men lay lounging like weary Inbourors caught with sleep in the midst of toil. On the seat beside the moujik, huddled up, with her face hid in her arms, was the wife. Lying on the floor. with a bundle of rags as a pillow, were the children. I bad to step over a grey-whiskered old man who was curled up in the gongway—a feeble, tottering creature to emigrate. Close to the door was an old woman, her face hanging forward and hidden, and her long, bare, skinny arms drooping over her knees. Tt was all very pathetic in that dim uncertain candle flare. There was no sound but the snore of deep sleeping men and the slow rumble, rumble of the moving train. I stood looking upon the woeful picture and thinking. Then n child cried ana its mother turned testily and slapped it.
The second day out from Moscow it became dull and cold, and a bleak wind scoured the plain. There was little but a sandy wilderness. The gale sounded round the crawling train with eerie moan. It picked up the sand and engulfed us in a brown gritty cloud. Everything in the carriage was thick with dust. It was to be tasted in the mouth and felt achingly in the eyes. To gaze from the windows was to look into a scudding fog that curved thick from the earth and thinned skyward. The train lumbered creakingly. Suddenly there was a lull. Either we were running out of the sand storm or it had spent self. The rain came in great drops, pat, pat, pat, fora long time. Phon swish came the deluge and the carriages rattled with the tattoo of the downpour. When it had passed, the air was sweet to breathe. The sun shone clear over the refreshed land. Then I set about with an old towel to thrash some of the grime from my belongings.
We traversed the Volga in the early ter noon. We went at a crawl over the great square network of a bridge perched igh on stone pillars whilst all devout Rus-jans on the train stood by the windows ardently crossing themselves. It is a wide muddy river, flowing sluggishly, and draining a stretch of country twice as large as Great Britain, There were two steamers surging away up, and great islands of rafts were floating down on the tide. When the train halted it was easy to hear the quaint, rhythmic, oar-Beating songs of the Volga boatmen. They had brought their rafts from the north, beyond Nijni Novgorod, the city of the great fair, and it would be months yet before they reached their journey's end down in the wild country of Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea.
Towards sundown we reached the bustle ing town of Samara and here we had an hour and a half weir. The platform, was all excitement and uproar. Samara is on the Volga, and a flock of folk from the north and south had come by water way to catch the Siberian train. There were a lot of slothful Tartars, sallow-skinned, slit-eyed, wisp-bearded, who had slouched their way from Mongolia, and were now slouching back. There were several fine-set Cossacks, carrying themselves proudly, their white sheepskin hats perched jauntily, double row of silver cartridge cases across their plum-coloured coats that fall from the waist like a quilted petticoat, and wearing long riding 1 oats of soft red moroc-ce. Above all were more peasants, unkempt and ragged, bent beneath bundles, driven hither and thither like sheep, most~ ly apathetic, crowding into the already overcrowded waggons and camping on any spare patch of floor.
Again we went snorting across the stop-ow and then we ran through clumps darkened pine. Forest fires have been raging this simmer and many hundreds of es were Inid waste. The refugees had Lastened to the railway line expecting there they would receive assistance. some twelve miles at one place there was astring of camps. It was evening as we passed, and tne glow of the camp fires on the lanky peasants as they stood and shouted chile the train puffed by made a striking scene.
Next morning as we rolled towards the Urals the country becime undulating and assing pretty. There was plenty of woodland and herbage end many a time it was easy to imagine a stretch of English scenery on a large scale. Now and then we scudded by a village. You can't imagine how
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