g round the entrance.

Inside, the car was thick, indeed, with smoke and the heavy exhalations
of the night. Men and women were sitting on the wooden benches; some
women were cooking in the tiny stove-room attached to the car; children,
half naked and unwashed, were playing on the floor; here and there a man
was still asleep; while one old man was painfully conning a paper of
"Homestead Regulations" which had been given him at Montreal, a lad of
eighteen helping him; and close by another lad was writing a letter, his
eyes passing dreamily from the paper to the Canadian landscape outside,
of which he was clearly not conscious. In a corner, surrounded by three
or four other women, was the mother they had come to seek. She held a
wailing baby of about a year old in her arms. At the sight of Elizabeth,
the child stopped its wailing, and lay breathing fast and feebly, its
large bright eyes fixed on the new-comer. The mother turned away
abruptly. It was not unusual for persons from the parlour-cars to ask
leave to walk through the emigrants'.

But Elizabeth's companion said a few words to her, apparently in
Russian, and Elizabeth, stooping over her, held out the milk. Then a
dark face reluctantly showed itself, and great black eyes, in deep,
lined sockets; eyes rather of a race than a person, hardly conscious,
hardly individualised, yet most poignant, expressing some feeling,
remote and inarticulate, that roused Elizabeth's. She called to the
conductor for a cup and a spoon; she made her way into the malodorous
kitchen, and got some warm water and sugar; then kneeling by the child,
she put a spoonful of the diluted and sweetened milk into the
mother's hand.

* * * * *

"Was it foolish of me to offer her that money?" said Elizabeth with
flushed cheeks as they walked back through the rain. "They looked so
terribly poor."

The Canadian smiled.

"I daresay it didn't do any harm," he said indulgently. "But they are
probably not poor at all. The Galicians generally bring in quite a fair
sum. And after a year or two they begin to be rich. They never spend a
farthing they can help. It costs money--or time--to be clean, so they
remain dirty. Perhaps we shall teach them--after a bit."

His companion looked at him with a shy but friendly curiosity.

"How did you come to know Russian?"

"When I was a child there were some Russian Poles on the next farm to
us. I used to play with the boys, and lea