we walked down the streets, we saw the young gallants with their sweethearts.

The Russians are not [illegible] untidy but there is no use talking, there is a certain swank to their clothes and their tall hats and long boots. When we went back to the ship following the road along the harbour. it was a most glorious sight. The moon at the full, shining through the crisp winter air on the hills and harbour. We entrained about noon, not in 2nd, 3rd or 4th class cars but in the 8 hommes 4 chevaux kind-in other words, ordinary box cars, officers and all. Our run of about 12 miles occupied about 31/2 hours at the end of which time we reached our destination-Vtoraya Ryecha or Second River. There is a town of that name but the station is just dumped down on the prairie along the sea shore, if you can imagine the combination. A walk from there of a mile or more brought us to our barracks up on the hill.

So here we are. As we came around the shores of this great bay and gazed across its frozen windswept surface at the mountains beyond, toward which were struggling in the far distance the teams of the Manchurians, it seemed as though we sensed for the first time the vast loneliness of this country-the oldest and youngest of all the continents- its frozen wastes repelling the imagination with its sense of unmeasured distances and dreadful isolation and yet drawing with its magic spell the adventurous of all lands. We are indeed encamped on the shores of Asia-we breath its air, we move with its people-a treasure house of antiquity that carries locked in its bosom vast stores of material wealth for generations yet unborn.

Our quarters here were formerly barracks occupied by Russian imperial troops built at great expense between 1905—14, but now abandoned to refugees and the allies. They are large and commodious and represent a part of a vast outlay undertaken by the Czar's Government to make it a great fortress-now, alas, a dead loss-all abandoned and running into the ground. The hills crowned with for-ts, trenches, galleries, etc, now forgotten and grass-grown and so on with the end of the chapter. Many of the numerous buildings were occupied

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