n found I was expected to share it
with a young Russian officer going home on leave. I quite regretted my
airy, quiet corner in the open shed.

All the next day we were steaming in leisurely fashion down the Iro,
making long stops at little hamlets in the forest, where all the
inhabitants of the half-dozen log houses clustered round the invariable
white church with green domes turned out to meet us, often bringing
bottles of delicious milk to sell. They were mostly of the peasant type,
large, fair, and stolid-looking. The scenery along the river was dull
and monotonous, low, heavily wooded banks, broken now and then by a
little clearing. It was a sodden, unkempt, featureless country, and I
found myself longing for the journey's end.

On the boat the third-class passengers were mostly Russian peasants and
a few Chinese, with a little group of frightened-looking Mongols. I
fancy they wished themselves back in the desert; I know I did. In the
first and second class there were almost none but military people, the
men all in full uniform of bewildering variety. Most of them were tall
and large, but rather rough in manner. I imagine one does not find the
pick of the Russian army on the frontier.

We reached Verchneudinsk well after dark, and a queer little tumble-down
phaeton took us to the inn chosen because of its German-speaking
landlord. Here I spent two days waiting for the Moscow Express. After I
had started my invaluable Wang off on his journey back to Peking by way
of Harbin and Mukden, I had nothing to do but rest and enjoy the
charming courtesies of the officials of the Russo-Asiatic Bank.
Verchneudinsk has little of interest, however; it is just a big, new
town, raw and unfinished, half logs and half stucco, with streets that
are mostly bog, and several pretentious public buildings and an ugly
triumphal arch marking the visit of the Tsar a few years ago.
Civilization has some compensations, but half-civilization is not
attractive; and it was a happy moment when I found myself with Jack in
my own little compartment on the Moscow Express, westward and homeward
bound.

CHAPTER XVI

A FEW FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF CHINA

It is rather presumptuous for the strolling Westerner who can count only
months in China to have any impressions at all of anything so huge, so
old, so varied, so complicated as China and its people, and still more
inexcusable to put these impressions before the world. And yet it may be
poss