The passengers from these trains wandered about the platform, mixing with the idlers from the town population. A crowd of peasants and travellers, engineers, and Red Cross attendants, soldiers, and merchants sauntered up and down in loose shirts and big boots, munching sunflower seeds and spitting out the husks till the platform was thick with refuse. A doctor who was in our train, and who was half a German, with an official training and an orthodox official mind, talked to the railway servants like a father. It was very wrong to strike, he said. They should have put down their grievances on paper and had them forwarded by the proper channels. The officials said that that would be waste of ink and caligraphy. “I wonder they don’t kill him,” said my travelling companion, and I agreed with him. Each passenger was given a rouble a day to buy food. The third-class passengers were given checks, in return for which they could receive meals. However, they deprecated the idea, and said that they wanted the amount in beer. They received it. Then they looted the refreshment room, broke the windows, and took away the food. This put an end to the check system. The feeling among the first-class passengers deepened. Something ought to be done, was the general verdict; but nobody quite knew what. They felt that the train ought to be placed in a position of safety. The situation on the evening of the second day began to resemble that described in Maupassant’s masterpiece, “Boule de Suif.” Nothing, however, could be done except to explore the town of Kouznetsk. It was warm autumn weather. The roads were soft and muddy, and there was a smell of rotting leaves in the air. It was damp and grey, with gleams of pitiful weak sunshine. In the middle of the town was a large market-place where a brisk trade in geese was carried on. One man whom I watched failed to sell his geese during the day, and while driving them home at night talked to them as if they had been dogs, saying, “Cheer up, we shall soon be home.” A party of convicts who belonged to the passenger train were working hard by the station, and implored the passing tribute of a sigh and a cigarette. Both were freely given. Convicts in Russia are always alluded to as “unfortunates.” I met them near the station and they at once said, “Give the unfortunates something.” In the evening, in one of the third-class carriages, a party of Little Russians, assistants in the Red Cross, sang songs in parts—melancholy, beautiful songs, with a strange trotting rhythm and no end and no beginning; and opposite their carriage on the platform a small crowd of moujiks gathered together and listened, saying that the men sang with cunning (_lovko paiout_).