give it up to make a living, which, after looking at him, I did not doubt at all.

"I found a large gathering at his home and was introduced to numerorus gendarme and police officials as an old friend of his from the conservatory at Kieff. After dinner my time came to play, and you can be assured I did all in my power to play myself right into the hearts of that company. When at last I played some compositions which I announced were my own, my host was beside himself with pride. It was as if he owned me, and he went about telling the absurdest lies about our long friendship and how famous I had come to be abroad since he had first n.et me in Brussels! Not even in America did I ever achieve such a mad success. I was showered with compliments and inquiries as to how much time I could afford to waste in Rostoff, and many embarrassing invitations, which I had to answer evasively because I had no inkling of what was to become of me.

"Finally my new friend of long-standing sought out and spirited away to an

all left except some half-dozen of the officials whom my host had asked to remain. Disdaining the prohibition law, he brought out some specially fine vodka and caviar, and we smoked and talked a few minutes. Then he arose, and standing in front of me said in Russian:

"My dear friend, I have spoken to these gentlemen about the unfortunate circumstances which placed you, my old comrade, in so trying a situation. We have discussed what is best to advise you to do. I am agreed with them in thinking it unwise that you should attempt to return to Kieff. We should have to make certain difficult explanations, and you might be worried again. I can give you permission to remain in Rostoff, and this is what I should like to have you do; but there are serious objections. So long as I am here, you would not be molested; but I may be removed suddenly. In addition, the city is very crowded, and all aliens are continually under suspicion. Much as I should like to have you here, after our long separation, I feel that it

would be unsafe for you, and my friends here agree with me.' "He stopped speaking and seemed confused, but at last continued: 'We know that circumstances may well have brought it about that in the matter of money you may be embarrassed. Although not experiencing the joy which is mine at renewing an old friendship, my comrades here feel that they have been privileged in hearing so great an artist interpret his own beautiful music. Whatever may be said of us, we Russians love and honor true art. We think that you will be more comfortable and can live in greater freedom at O in Siberia, which is not an unpleasant city and is situated on the railway. We earnestly beg that you will not refuse us the pleasure of aiding you a little on your journey and will accept this small memento of our pleasant meeting.'

"He handed me an envelope containing a thousand rubles and instructions where to go next day to obtain a railway pass to Siberia!"

The man who told me this story hated intensely the old gendarme system and the whole autocratic government, but he ended it with the observation that almost without exception the Russian people were deeply sympathetic and kind at heart, and that only the corrupt and blind system of government could explain the awful cruelty of which frequently the officials. were guilty.

This significant fact goes far to explain the fine restraint and moderation with which the entire nation threw off the old régime, avoiding almost all excesses of hatred and vengeance. The revolution brought to the exile places of Siberia a liberation the like of which history had not seen before, but it was a peaceful liberation. When at the Russian Christmas Alexander Ivanovich drove me to the railway station to take the evening train for Petrograd a presentiment of this change was in the air, but how little we realized the transformation that was impending!

Under the brilliant, icy stars the Siberian winter was exquisitely beautiful. Our sleigh sped through the familiar

birch-woods, which now had become a host of sleeping virgins wayward in the wistful beauty of their slim, bare forms, gleaming like pearl, and the massive, snowy cedars seemed like greatly burdened giants murmuring of rest. The mighty river had become like steel, supporting any weight. Along its dimly marked margin in the night we heard the sounds of the frost, a shuffling of the snow, muffled reports, a distant crackling in the forest, and slurring noises without location. Confused and quivering sounds came to us that one could fancy the spirit echo of a battle-field, the flight of ghostly armies from scarlet lands to lands forever pale. Beyond the dead river lay the dead' waste of the steppes, fields for the Tatarmad gales of January, home of the sable and ermine and white fox, a waste that shadowy herds of reindeer know and only the Siberian nomads will dare in a storm. Even ugly, dirty Tomsk had become a cluster of jewels on white velvet, with its spires of crystal slenderness, its many golden crosses and frosted sapphire domes. We left the cathedral behind and passed the grim prison which had confined in repulsive squalor Dostoievsky's marvelous genius; for of all countries the old Russia was the land of temples and of prisons. The tower, ecclesiastical or political, marked all her national landscape. It has been struck out in a day, and with it the exile places are gone.

During the last weeks of March the exile villages of the Ob moved in ragged, but deliriously joyful, cohorts into Tomsk, and their counterparts on the Irtysh around Tobolsk and on the Lena, beyond frigid Yakutsk, joined the amazing hegira to the railway. In the picturesque language of Alexander Ivanovich, "it was as if some irresistible wind from the North had arisen and drove them like dead forest leaves before it to the Trans-Siberian, where they filled every train that rushed them to Petrograd and Moscow. From Narym they flooded Tomsk in a day, and because we had visited them last summer, hundreds came hurrying to me, so that at last I had to bar the door and

stay at home, for they all wished immediate aid to carry them to Russia." In two weeks a hundred thousand of them poured out of the frozen wilderness on every conceivable sort of sledge, from those drawn by dogs to the thrilling Russian troikas, drawn by three horses jangling scores of bells. They flooded and jammed the forest trails, they broke new roads over the river ice, and did not pause through the long Siberian nights. Into Irkutsk alone fifty thousand came. Many of them had not been out of the forest for thirty years, had been sent into exile all the way by sleigh from Russia before the railway was constructed. The population gave them what clothes could be spared, and the train-loads of them exhibited grotesque sights indeed. One man seized the gold-embroidered coat of a deposed governor and wore it proudly home.

They who had been held as accursed suddenly awaked to find themselves the idolized heroes of a hundred and eighty million people who were in a great heroic

mood. Their progress into Russia was one long triumphal march, with official receptions, banquets, and unlimited oratory at every stop. They reaped what in past generations tens of thousands of Russia's best died to sow, and the exile system, which was older than Peter the Great, crumbled in a cloud of glory for them. In the first pathetically bright flush of hope and confidence that followed the czar's overthrow the Russian people found in them a perfect embodiment of their sufferings and their liberation. Moscow and Petrograd welcomed them as no emperor was ever welcomed, and the lovely Crimean towns were soon teeming with them, where orange-groves and vineyards, songs and friendly laughter, restored shattered nerves. Russia, the mottled land of contrasts, the home of high lights, never presented a more striking spectacle. And this exile army has brought an incalculable influence to bear in that stupendous, immensely potential enigma which for want. of clearer terms we call free Russia.