lains taking people to China, but very few people get
down at the platform where I have to watch. This makes my life
rather lonely, and I am thrown back much upon the books I have.
But I cannot discuss these very much with my neighbours,
for enlightened ideas have not spread in this part of Russia
so much as in other parts. Many of the peasants round here
have never heard of Bernard Shaw.

"I am a Liberal, and do my best to spread Liberal ideas; but since
the failure of the revolution this has been even more difficult.
The revolutionists committed many acts contrary to the pure principles
of humanitarianism, with which indeed, owing to the scarcity of books,
they were ill acquainted. I did not approve of these cruel acts,
though provoked by the tyranny of the government; but now there
is a tendency to reproach all Intelligents with the memory of them.
This is very unfortunate for Intelligents.

"It was when the railway strike was almost over, and a few trains
came through at long intervals, that I stood one day watching
a train that had come in. Only one person got out of the train,
far away up at the other end of it, for it was a very long train.
It was evening, with a cold, greenish sky. A little snow had fallen,
but not enough to whiten the plain, which stretched away a sort
of sad purple in all directions, save where the flat tops
of some distant tablelands caught the evening light like lakes.
As the solitary man came stamping along on the thin snow by the train
he grew larger and larger; I thought I had never seen so large a man.
But he looked even taller than he was, I think, because his
shoulders were very big and his head comparatively little.
From the big shoulders hung a tattered old jacket, striped dull
red and dirty white, very thin for the winter, and one hand rested
on a huge pole such as peasants rake in weeds with to burn them.

"Before he had traversed the full length of the train he was entangled in one
of those knots of rowdies that were the embers of the extinct revolution,
though they mostly disgraced themselves upon the government side.
I was just moving to his assistance, when he whirled up his rake and laid
out right and left with such energy that he came through them without scathe
and strode right up to me, leaving them staggered and really astonished.

"Yet when he reached me, after so abrupt an assertion of his aim,
he could only say rather dubiously in French that he wanted a house.