of the hill, where a motor bus was rapidly filling with passengers.

After a ride of twenty minutes all the passengers helpfully put me off at a street corner, and one of them, who was also dismounting, led me to a building the address of which corresponded to the one on my letter. A great many people lived in the building, none of whom seemed ever to have heard of the man I was looking for until one told me he had moved away, he did n't know where. Well, Nova Sibersk is a rather large city, and I was on a wide street of shops and public buildings; but, now that it seemed to be difficult, I wanted more than ever to find my friend of the letter. So I kept on showing people the name on the envelope and rather enjoyed the sensation of feeling like a waif. And after a while I was somehow shoved along to a large new office building and into a room filled with clerks and typists and up to a very busy and important-looking man at a desk in one corner. He was friendly and to the point.

'What do you want?' he asked.

'I want someone to buy my ticket and help me on to the train for Semipalatinsk to-night,' I answered.

'Very well,' he said, and spoke to a clerk.

In a minute a villainous-looking chap in a huge fur hat swaggered in. He looked like a very tough driver of a very big brewery wagon.

"This man,' said my friend, 'will do all you want. He will come to the station at ten to-night. Pay him three rubles for his services. Is there anything else?'

'No, thank you,' I answered gratefully, and came back to the station.

I am ensconced here in the first-class buffet, a small room with a fancy counter covered with fruit in piles and pastries in rows, and two long tables covered with once white cloths and

laden with rubber plants and Christmas trees in pots and silver candelabra and three-tiered cake plates, and surrounded by a varied collection of jaded travelers, all of the men in high boots and huge coats of every known kind of fur and fur hats, some of them quite as big as dishpans. And all of them have beards. Siberia should have been called 'Sibeardia'!

In the waiting room outside, too, there is a wonderful collection of humans Buriats and Tatars and Mongols and others of the strange races who occupy corners of Siberia, many of them, in fur hats and tightwaisted coats and high boots, looking exactly like various versions of Santa Claus.

My guide may look like a ruffian, but he seems to have a good heart. He has just come in, though it is only three instead of ten, and has gallantly brought me some tea and cakes and settled down to be friendly. With the aid of my pocket dictionary we have been holding spirited conversation. He has no feeling for the alphabet at all, but is indefatigable in thumbing through pages of the dictionary until he finds the word he wants. He has told me how many Communists there are in England, in France, in Germany, and the total for the world, and has asked me numberless questions about both China and America. I am writing this while he looks up words in order to tell me something new and remarkable about Soviet Russia. 'Did you know John Reed?' he has just asked me. 'I worship him. He was Russia's wonderful friend.'

He has also been pointing out to me various individuals here in the waiting room and whispering to me darkly that they are 'white' and 'no true friends of Russia.' Then, pointing to a young woman across the table with whom I had been trying to talk before he came

in, he scrambled through the dictionary to point out to me that she was an 'entertainer of suspected persons.'

This city used to be called Novo Nikolayevsk until the people who no longer honor tsars changed it to 'New Siberia,' and it has been growing fast since the building of the branch railway to Semipalatinsk has brought Central Asian commerce here instead of by river to Omsk. And it is a New Siberia. I wish I could tell you what a feeling I have had of the difference between the people here and on the train and the Russians of the old Russia whom I have known in New York and Peking. The latter live so tragically in the past, whereas these people live so hopefully for the future.

But my ardent guide has brought me some soup, so I must change my pencil for a spoon. I'll write more on the train.

February 2

I am on the last train I'll see this year, and not only is it a very strange train, but I am very surprised to be here.

At ten last night my guide was still entertaining me when a woman with a shawl over her head came up and muttered in his ear. "That's my wife,' he grinned. 'She wants me to come home. I'll be back before one to tend to your luggage.'

As my train did n't leave till 3.45 I had n't worried when at one he had n't returned. But a few minutes after one the 'entertainer of suspected persons' came rushing up to me, talking very excitedly, and others joined her, all trying to explain something to me in very rapid Russian, which I finally gathered to be that there was a rule that no baggage would be weighed and checked after one o'clock, also that the left-luggage room closed at one. Well, I knew that a rule was a rule in Russia.

I'd been running into them all day. No luggage allowed in the waiting room. No sleeping allowed in the station. It was almost as bad as America. I began to see visions of waiting another twenty-four hours in the station without sleeping, and knew it could n't be done.

By this time a crowd had collected, all trying to tell me what to do. But the young woman took me by the arm and marched me to the baggage room, where the man was just locking up. He was surly at first, but weakened at her tale of my sad plight and promised to wait till I could bring my stuff to be weighed. Then we rushed to the leftluggage office half a block away and found it locked. She banged on the door and a very cross man appeared, but she finally melted him too and he promised to keep open till we could find a porter.

But we could n't find a porter. She told my tale to every porter in the station, but they were all busy. Finally we went to the first baggageman with a second tale of woe. He was grumpy, but produced a porter, and the porter got my eleven pieces of baggage over in several trips, my efficient friend waiting at one baggage room and I at the other; it was weighed, I paid the excess, and we sat on it till train time, having kept both baggage offices open an hour after their closing time.

All this to prove that it is lucky for women traveling alone that there are so many Boy-Scout-intentioned people in the world.

Miss Entertainer of Suspected Persons was very friendly and saw me on to the train, which was a good thing, too, as the porter put me on the wrong car and there was a most awful fuss and I should n't have known what it was all about.

Just before the train started, who

should appear but the faithless guide, with a pathetic tale of how he had gone to sleep, and demanding his three rubles for what he had n't done; and since I could n't explain to a car of interested spectators about how he had n't earned it, it seemed easier to pay.

This train is all 'hard,' but I slept well on my broad berth, across from a frowzy woman in a red kerchief who ate raw fish in the middle of the night. We are jogging slowly across more fields of snow, stopping longer than we go and yet running quite according to schedule. This leisurely rate gives me long walks at the tiny stations, where I buy piroshkies, delicious hot meat pastries, and eat them as I walk and feel farther and farther away from anything I've ever known before. To-morrow I reach Semipalatinsk, the jumping-off place where I start my long trip by sleigh to Chinese Turkestan.

This journey is being so difficult that I feel more exhilarated and on top of the world each time I accomplish a stage of it. Whereas certainly the fact that I am here at all is no credit to me, but only because Russia is so full of nice people.

I must confess that when I reached here I felt somewhat as if I had come to a blank wall across my way, and that a rendezvous with one's husband at a place called Chuguchak in Chinese Turkestan seemed almost as impossible as everyone in Peking had told us it was. It must be possible. Chuguchak is on the map, and other people

go there. But it is four hundred miles away, across desolate wastes of snow. The road, they tell me, is well-nigh impossible and the cold terrific. To get there I must hire a sleigh and, if possible, I must find a traveling companion, as the sleigh drivers are unreliable and there are Kirghiz bandits on the road. And I'm sure I don't know how to accomplish all this. The people here seem horrified at the idea of my attempting it. Of course, lack of language is my chief difficulty, as my Russian is quite inadequate for anything so complicated.

My only move when I came to Semipalatinsk was to find a woman about whom I knew nothing at all except that her name was Kosloff and that her husband worked in the post office. I had met her brother when we were marooned in Kweihwa last summer and he had given me a letter to her.

When I arrived, after thirty-three hours 'hard,' and climbed out of the dim car into a glittering world of snow, I was assaulted by a mob of drivers all inviting me with howls to ride in their sleighs. They were mostly grinning red-skinned Orientals, Sarts or Tatars, and they had comic little sleighs about the size and shape of baby carriages attached to horses that looked huge and rawboned compared with China ponies. Beyond the sleighs was a white plain across which rose roofs and towers and church domes of the city.

The frowzy woman watched my luggage in the car while the porter made trips back and forth, and then she slid merrily off with her man in a tiny raft of a sleigh lined with straw. I picked the merriest driver; he piled his baby carriage with my luggage, and me perched on top, till I was certain we'd topple over. And sure enough we did, right in the middle of the plain. The sleigh turned quite over, the driver and

I and the luggage flew in all directions, and the horse ran away.

Everything retrieved, we drove into the city, across a great market place full of Russians and strange Orientals and stalls and carts of produce, past a wild-looking chap galloping in with a string of huge horses, the halter of each tied to the tail of the one in front, and to the post office, where I found Kosloff. He was cordial and sent me on home to his wife.

We drove up to a two-story unpainted log house and I banged on the front door to no effect. I went around to the back and a woman in a shawl pointed me up some steep stairs and through a door into a kitchen littered with dirty dishes, remnants of food, dogs, cats, and babies, where several women with rough red hands and faces were working. A merry roly-poly girl owned to being Mrs. Kosloff and took me into her little room, a typical tenementhouse room where she and her husband, two small children, the dog and the cat, all lived together in grubby squalor.

The Kosloffs insisted on my staying with them, which seemed impossible, as, except for sharing a kitchen with the other occupants of the tenement, they had only the one room, which was nearly half filled with my luggage. But I saw they were going to be really offended if I would not accept their hospitality, so here I am. Mr. Kosloff has given me his bed, two boards on horses, Chinese style, and he sleeps on the floor.

Mr. Kosloff came home at four and we had dinner-a piroque, which was a sort of fish pie, soup, and little birds. We sat on packing boxes around an oilcloth-covered table. There were n't enough dishes and everything was dirty, but it tasted wonderful, as it was my first real meal since leaving Manchouli a week ago. Mrs. Kosloff feeds

two men who live in the next room, as well as her own family.

It is easy to see that the Kosloffs have not always lived as they do now, and I liked their manner of being apologetic about and at the same time unashamed of their poverty. We have had great fun laughing over our pocket-dictionary conversations, and they have told me a little about themselves. At the time of the Revolution many of their friends and relatives fled from Russia and some took an active part in General Anenkoff's attacks against the Bolsheviki from across the Turkestan border. They themselves were undecided whether to attempt to flee to America or remain in Russia, but could not bear the idea of living in any other country and so stayed on, hoping for the gradual return of prosperity under Communist rule. The Communists, however, were suspicious of them because of their many connections with imperialists. For a while Mr. Kosloff was imprisoned and later had much difficulty obtaining work, and, while he has become a thoroughly loyal Communist, it is only very recently that he has been really trusted by his party.

They seem very confident that better times are coming soon, and suffer their poverty cheerfully for what they consider a great cause. The two handsome youths who board with them, now actors in a local company, also talked of Communism ardently and with the idealism of youth, and the little girl proudly showed me pictures of Lenin in her schoolbook.

February 4

I slept well on my board bed, and helped wash last night's greasy dishes in a saucer of water with no soap and dried them with a dirty rag. Then we had breakfast of the cold remains of the fish pie, tea, and bread and butter.

The room was cold, shivery cold, and the baby spread his tea over most of the table and hit us all with his spoon. They feed him all the sugar he yells for. Neither the dog, the cat, nor the baby is house-broken.

After breakfast we made a gesture of cleaning up and Mrs. Kosloff took me to the Soviet House to register. It was bitter cold, but sunny. It all looked exactly as a Siberian town should look -houses of plaster or log lining wide snowy streets that lead to a greendomed church. On the way home we stopped in the market to buy fresh butter and honey and black bread. Everywhere I have been in Siberia food seems plentiful and very cheap, though other prices are high. It was there in the market place, with its frontier mixture of races and costumes and its camels and horses and ponies, that I realized that I was really at the gateway of Central Asia.

Mrs. Kosloff enterprisingly accosted every group of Orientals we met while we were out to ask if they had come from Chuguchak and how they came and what the road was like. They all reported that the road is bad and cold and that it takes from ten to twenty days to make the trip. We've followed several clues as to possible drivers, all in vain, and now I feel balked and discouraged and at a loss what to do next. I was told at the Soviet House that I must leave Semipalatinsk in a couple of days in order to cross the border before my visa expires.

But what really worries me is that I can't get in touch with Owen and so have no way of knowing if he has been able to get to Chuguchak himself. I expected to find letters or a telegram here, but none have come. There is a telegraph line from here to the Turkestan border, from which messages can be sent by courier to the Russian consul in Chuguchak to be delivered if

advisable. I sent two messages, but no answer has come. He had wanted to come here to meet me if he could get a Russian visa, but there has not been time for him to do that since he wirelessed me from Urumchi, and as my visa is expiring fast I can't wait on the chance that he will come. But it would be tragic to pass him on the way. It is all very confusing.

February 6

Suddenly I seem to be on my way.

Instead of living in the Kosloffs' merry, grubby tenement I am sitting on the felt-covered floor of a mudwalled low-ceilinged Kazak hut, with scarcely enough light to write by at nine o'clock in the morning, for the hut is buried in snow.

But first I must tell you how I got here. Yesterday morning, still no telegram, and only one day left. My Russian friends had failed to find a sleigh for me, so I determined to look for one myself. I went first to the Chinese consulate, thinking that they must have made arrangements there for Chinese travelers passing through and might be able to help me. The consul was cordial, and I was so stirred to find someone with whom I could talk that my Chinese has never been so fluent.

He told me that a courier from the consulate was starting out that very afternoon, traveling down with some cargo, and that I could go with him if I wished. I shied a little when I heard 'cargo,' knowing how slowly freight usually travels, but he assured me that we should n't be more than ten days on the road. He spoke of it as a wonderful opportunity, and yet when it came I was almost afraid to take it because I had n't heard from Owen. I explained my fears to him and he reassured me again, saying that even if he had started from Chuguchak I could n't miss him, as there was only one road