DEAREST FAMILY,

NOVA SIBERSK, SIBERIA February 1, 1927

You know I always did maintain, against the popular assumption and your grave doubts, that a woman could travel alone more easily than a man. A man is expected to look after himself and do things for himself, and besides he is often darkly suspected of being a spy or some sort of subterranean agent, and is in consequence cross-questioned and harried, examined and watched, until he begins to wonder himself if he has any right to be there. Whereas a woman alone, whether she wants it so or not, seems always to be an object of public concern and beneficence. In fact it seems probable that she could travel to any iniquitous city or barbarous country in the world and be convinced that it was full of kindly people. For everywhere there are some who take pleasure in good deeds and she is their involuntary target. To officials she can completely explain her 'profession' by the innocuous term of 'housewife,' and the 'purpose of her journey,' 'to join her husband.' These anyone can understand and warm to. Her existence is explained, her journey justified.

And now I feel as if this journey of mine were going to prove or disprove my theory forever, for I am sure that

nothing could be much more difficuit for a woman to do alone than to set out across the snow wastes of Siberia in the dead of winter toward a vague spot in Central Asia with the ridiculous name of Chuguchak.

Do you remember how, less than three years ago, when Dorothy and I crossed Siberia on a comfortable modern express train, it seemed an adventuresome and daring journey fraught with unknown dangers? How ridiculously simple that seems now compared with what I am about to do! We would walk up and down the platform at stations like the one where I am now and feel delicious thrills at being in Siberia, and yet we felt so protected, knowing that we should jump back on to the train again and should n't have to leave it until we were safe in China. I should no more have thought of stopping in a town like this than I should of letting go Mother's hand and venturing across the nursery before I had learned to walk. Yet this morning I watched the Trans-Siberian express disappear into the snowy distance with a feeling of exaltation that now I was really in Siberia with a journey ahead of me into a region few foreigners have traveled.

I have been in Siberia, as a matter of fact, for four days now, but always

under the protection of the friendly express train. So far my journey has been beautifully simple and proved my theory to perfection, for it might easily have been difficult if the world were n't so full of those people who like to be nice to women traveling alone.

In fact I feel as if I had been handed along from place to place on a series of silver platters. In Peking, in the short week I had after Owen's wireless came from Urumchi, everyone set to work helping me, and with shoppings and packings and farewells I left there in a whirl. Then at Mukden a young Englishman, friend of a friend in Peking, tended to all the irksome business of transferring luggage for me, securing my reservation and seeing me safe on to my next train.

The train this time was on the Japanese line which runs from Mukden to Changchun, and had Pullman cars so exactly like those in America that it made me homesick, since I felt already out of China and yet not in America, for the porters were small and Japanese instead of big and black, and there were neatly folded kimonos and leather slippers supplied to destroy the illusion of the curtained berths.

From Changchun to Harbin I felt farther still from China, for the train and porters were Russian. The porters in the Harbin station were Russian, too, and wore big white aprons.

At Harbin I was looked after again by friends of friends, who helped me to secure my visa for Chinese Turkestan and changed my money, partly into yen for my railway ticket, partly into Harbin dollars for last odds and ends of shopping, and partly into rubles to use in Siberia; who entertained me delightfully and gave me introductions to people in Manchouli and here; and who saw me off at the station with fudge and fruit cake and mince pies.

I wish I could tell you about Harbin, as I am sure it is like no place else on earth. It is a Russian city in China, ugly and crass like other frontier towns, full of riffraff, and famed for the extravagance of its night life and its cabarets crowded with the débris of the Russian imperialist refugees and Chinese a little carried away by the feeling of race superiority given by their ability to domineer over the ragtag and bobtail of white Russians who form a large part of the city's population. The Chinese flaunt their Russian women in an attempt to live up to the youngsters of the American and European business communities, who flaunt their Russian women in an attempt to live up to the East.

In Manchouli on the Russian border I had to wait a day to arrange with the customs for permission to carry four cameras and a lot of films and photographic supplies through Siberia. I was met at the station by the Chinese postmaster and by Manchouli's only English-speaking inhabitant, the latter a most surprising person to find in that scraggly frontier town scraggly frontier town-a delightful hermit who raises goldfish and Angora cats and who entertained me charmingly in his little study lined with books and Persian rugs. All my meals in Manchouli I had with him and wished there might be more.

At Manchouli, too, I had my first experience of a Russian hotel, cold and ugly enough, where I managed to ask for tea and hot water, and where a price list on the door, which I laboriously spelled out with the help of my pocket dictionary, informed me how much I must pay for each, as well as for the towel and sheets and pillowcase which I had also ordered in my best phrase-book Russian, and how much I should have had to pay had I had a samovar or a bath.

While I was being entertained by

the friendly postmaster or the charming Englishman, by some mysterious means permission was obtained for all my luggage to go through uninspected and my ticket was bought, and I had only to wait in the station master's inner office while other passengers' suitcases were being emptied and their most private belongings exhibited to the public gaze. Then post-office coolies carried my luggage on to the train, where I discovered to my delight that I had a pleasant compartment entirely to myself.

On Russian trains one travels 'hard' or'soft' or 'wagon-lits'-a'hard' ticket entitling one to an unupholstered berth in a car much like a third-class sleeping car on the Continent, a 'soft' ticket to a berth in a well-fitted secondclass compartment, and 'wagon-lits' to a place on one of the old international sleeping cars taken over by the Trans-Siberian and run only on the semiweekly express trains. I traveled 'soft' and found it clean and comfortable, probably more comfortable with my compartment all to myself than if I'd traveled grandly 'wagonlits,' though I was amused to discover that I was looked down on socially by the other foreigners on the train, who spoke of it condescendingly as traveling 'Russian' in contrast to traveling 'international.'

Out of the window of my compartment was snow crisp, sunny snow everywhere as far as I could see. Lake Baikal was buried deep, with little sleighs darting across it like black flies, and I wondered if they were anything like the sleigh that I should travel in after I left the railway.

It was a great lark to hop out at little stations in the tingling cold and eat a bowl of hot cabbage soup with sour cream in it at the station buffet, or buy a circle of hot fresh bread, new butter, and a little roasted chicken for

my supper from a peasant woman at a wooden stall.

After four sunny, snowy days of Siberia I reached here this morning and wished again that I were n't trying to carry quite so much luggage to the middle of Asia. Watching it on and off trains had become a dizzier process at every stop. Here it was speedily loaded on a sledge, and when I told the whiteaproned porter I was waiting for the train to Semipalatinsk he trundled it half a block to a sort of left-luggage office and deposited it in a heap on the floor.

I had rather expected I should have to spend this eighteen hours' wait between trains sitting on it in the station, but I find that it would not have been allowed in the station at all, which is far too crowded with people to leave room for their luggage, so I am free of it till 3.45 in the morning, which is the ungodly time my train departs for Semipalatinsk.

The ticket office is closed till train time, and with my six phrases of the Russian language, the jam of passengers, and my jam of luggage I felt quite hopeless about ever getting it and me on to the train without assistance. I had a letter to somebody somewhere here, but when I looked out of the station door the city seemed a long way off and the day felt very cold. However, I took a deep breath and

set out.

There was a row of droshkies across from the station. I chose the kindestlooking of the drivers and showed him the address on my letter. He answered with a torrent of language which I finally assorted into meaning that it would cost me five rubles to get there in a droshky, but I could go in an automobile for thirty kopecks.

'Where is the automobile?' I asked. 'I'll show you,' volunteered a small boy at my heels, and led me to the top