The Birmingham age-herald., 1914-08-23
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is no mistaking him. Tolstoi has not only drawn his picture true to life, but in his own garb he has impersonated him before the world. That Moujik on the shore of Russia is the brother of 100, ,000,- GOO Russian peasants.
 Everything in his background Is as Russian as he. For while the train was crossing the brook, a lightning change of scene took place that would do credit To the mechanism of the theatrical stage. In the brief course of d journey of only mile between the German frontier sta ton, one civilization vanished and an- other replaced it.
 When the passengers descend from the train to the soil of the Autocrat of all the Russians, they find themselves in world transformed. In their faces, their eyes, their boards, their caps their coats and their boots the people on the platform are as different from their neighbors a mile away as if oceans di- vided them. As the arriving strangers gaze curiously about them upon the min lons and subjects of the Czar and reflect that they are in darkest Russia" the land of the tartar the nihilst, the spy, the censor, the knout and Siberia, a timid hush falls upon chem. With un- wonted docility they surrender their passports they file between big uni formed men who. with pistols in their belts, guard the one exit from the plat form, the only open door into Russia Herding into a big room of the station as into a pen, they are made aware by the incense which fills the. waiting room and startles their nostrils that they have passed from the grandeur that was Rome to the glory that was Greece, and that they stand before an altar of the Greek church. For the altar is as distinctive a feature of Russian railway stations as the samovar with its boiling water all ways ready for the brewing of the cup that cheers race of inveterate tea drinkers.
 Travellers on crossing frontiers are used to finding another language and another money but now at this frontier station they are baffled by another alphabet. The letters are lying down, rolling over or standing on their heads as if in a drunken revel and make mocking faces at the hungry westerner when he takes up the bill of fare in the station res taurant Perhaps the next discovery that surprises him is the calendar on the wall by which he learns that while he was crossing the little bridge over the brook he lost IS days and that although he may have celebrated New Years in New York, he is in time to celebrate it again iT St. Petersburg.
 When at last the bell rings and he is permitted to leave his cage the passen-
 
 sangplank and finds that the very rail road bed is changed. For the Czar has prudently seen to it that the rails are laid wider apart so that if the troops of the Kaiser should attempt an invasion they would have to come afoot and horse- back as Napoleon's legions did in 1S12 when they moved upon lhe Russian bor- der in a front of 400 miles
 The Invasion of 1912
 Thus widely spread out the oncoming host bewildered the Czar and his gem erals who had 250,00O armed serfs oraWn up to defend the frontier bu. dared not concentrate them since the point of invasion was unknown The handsome Gear himself had come from St. Petersburg to an outpost of his Empire and made his headquarters in the town of Wilma. There he was wait ing and watching when the French Elm peror swept down from the Baltic, the pumes of King Muriat waving at the head of magnificent body of cavalry. while another army marched under Prince Eugene and a third under the command of King Jerome of West phslia.
 Napoleons first purpose was to push back the boundary line of Ruesia which has been stealthily moving 1t westward over prostrate Poland. But he failed, and at his downfall Russia crent still farther forward, gathering in most of the territory of the G-anu puchy of warsaw. The railway passen- ger therefore rides 30 miles into the empire as it now is before he comes to the frontier that Napoleon crossed, when he found the boundary in the middle of the Niemen at Kovno.
 A little way out of Xovno, there Is