The Birmingham age-herald., 1906-12-16

rage Wnlle the StIlkeTS pusuSu away LhS engine and let the steam out.
 So this time 1 thought I would try change, and I believe the train de luxe was as good train as most of its kind. I mean, the electric light could be switched on bright for evening and shaded for night. the meals did not make the passengers more sicky than is usual in trains, I observed that the first class had looking glass panels In the doors, and what with stoves and double win dows, the warmth would have thawed a polar bear
 The train goes once a week and covers the full journey to Tifiis in four days and four nights. 1 don't know the miles, but it looks a good long way on the map, es pecially as the passengers have to be car ried around by the Caspian Sea and Baku , instead of dashing across the great noun tain chain, as I hope to do if the bri- gands will be so obliging for the next four days.
 Half of Russia Starving. We left Moscow in apparent calm. The merchants were rejoicing at trade re- newed the "cadets'' were making speeches in their new club in prepara- ton for the elections; the revolutionists were collecting arms. Outside the city came the plots and gardens and dairy farms which feed it.
 Then we entered one of the starvation districts. The wide. bare land stretched away on every side. almost without ripple. Here and there the novels of Wretched village stood huddled together in the dirt from which they sprung.
 Peasants could be seen creeping list lessly about. Half Russie is starving. What accounts, then, for the extraordl- nary increase of trade?
 Candles are selling 40 per cent more than ever before, is vodka, so is every thing, and no one knows why. Merchants puzzle over it in vain as they rake in their bewildering profits; some say the foreign loans must have filtered down to the people, some that the soldiers return ing from the war are spending their wages; some that the peasant has gained a wider outlook on life from the Duma, some than in despair he is lavishing his little hoardings on a merry life though short one.
 No one knows. We accepted the fact. gazed at the starving villages edged with drifts of early snow, and the train de luxe passed on.
 Towards evening we entered forests of birch and fir that warm the cities and mako the engines go A flight of wild duck passed over a reedy pool Wild duck was course in the dinner of the  ed to be amused.
 Next morning we were passing through the broad belt of the black earth, whose corn goes to feed England, Germany-in fact. most European countries. except Russia. Peasants were out scra atching the soft, dark soil with their teams of thin oxen and little horses.
 The surface of the land was now more broken up, more fretted into slopes and valleys by the oozing streams. and grad ually 1t merged into the steppes of the Cossacks of the Don-vast, sweeping plains, with far distant, blue horizons, giving a sense of space such as I have only known on the Orange river veldt. No rocky kopies break the surface, but the careless, muddy roads are the same, the carts just making a new track when the old one grows impossible
 The isolated little graveyards are the same, too, but the people are loosely gath cred into haphazard villages of huts. whitewashed and matched. These are the houses of the Cossacks, so dreaded in the streets so useless in the war.
 Prisoners on Train.
 As we passed through one of the Cos sack stations a train stood drawn up on a siding close by. It was mixed train of all three classes and some trucks. But in the center were three large vans with heavily grated windows-grated by iron | bars In SqudfeS-dnu through lne DdfS the l faces of men, women and little Children | were peering out. They were prisoners with their families on their way to Mos COW, where they will join the thousands | who are being constantly drafted off to the Siberian exile.
 The other day I met a great Siberian | merchant, who has known the country up and down for forty years. He told me that the average of intelligence was so far higher in Siberia than in Russia that it seemed like different nation.
 He attributed this to the vast numbers of 'intelectuals" who have lived in exile there for their views politics and he thinks that in the future it will be ,ead- ing country in the world.
 The colonel was saying that the Er like a dry champagne, but all Russians drink it sweet, and the train de luxe passed on. Soon afterward we ran along the bank of the slowly moving River Don l itself. bearing heavy barges of coal and wood. and as darkness fell we entered the big town of Rostoff, close to that queer little Sea of Azof we used to read about in the geography text books.
 In the early morning the scene had com petely changed again. and the train de luxe was now moving through a wide, grassy prairie. dotted with little hay stacks In places stood great fields of corn and the peasants were out gather Ing the orange cobs into wicker carts, for we were approaching the south.
 By many little signs l knew too. that we were approaching the mountains. Rivers rushed down, gray and turbid with the washings of the glaciers. Each peasant at work wore decorated knife, two feet long. stuck in his girdle. Our train had taken up guard of soldiers with fixed bayonets. four to each car riage, to protect Its Luxury, and suddenly on the horizon I saw line of low hills.
 Mountains Sighted.
 All through the journey the gloom of Russia had hung over the land without a ray of sun. In front of us now I saw a deeper gloom, but 1t was purple Instead of gray. and I knew 1t was the noun