me that year, I shall not forget the hours spent in reading St. John. [SN: TO SIBERIA] It was early November when we started for Siberia. Snow had already fallen, and the rivers were frozen over. Life in the country seemed to have died out, and the monotony of the eternal snow became intolerable. I began to suffer from snow-blindness, and at night to see visions which afforded me a strange mixture of almost intolerable pain and exquisite pleasure at the same time. Brilliant forms--purple, orange, scarlet, blue--danced before my eyes, and I thought I had never seen anything so beautiful, while at the same time my head was throbbing with pain as in fever. Siberia was at first an agreeable disappointment to us. We had always thought of it as a wild and barbarous place, and we were surprised to find it in many ways more modern than Russia. Baikal afforded us the pleasantest surprise. Most of us had never heard of it before. We saw it under superb conditions. Never, even in Switzerland, have I seen a lake with a blue so gay or snow-capped hills shining so splendidly in the sun. Often we met train-loads of Russian soldiers on their way to the front, and they treated us as comrades. Some, indeed, asked us what sort of life prisoners of war led in Germany, and if we could give them letters of recommendation for any German who might happen to capture them. We were fed on the same rations as the Russian soldiers themselves, receiving at least half a litre of good soup daily, with the meat that had been boiled in it. The meat was cut up on the dirty boards of the carriage, and then passed from unwashed hand to unwashed hand until it reached the man for whom it was intended. Twenty pairs of verminous, soot-black hands might have touched your meat before it got to you. In addition we had two (Russian) pounds of black bread per day. This was sour and so moist that you could sometimes wring the water out of it. The crown of our feast was the “Kasha,” _i.e._, buckwheat or other porridge drenched in fat. At first we liked this better even than the delicious Russian soups, but afterwards in camp we grew so tired of it that we used to feed the pigs with it. If we had always received our rations they would have been ample. But on the railway our guards were changed every three or four days, and this system gave them a good opportunity of cheating us. We would receive guards, say for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. On Monday and Tuesday we would get our food; but on Wednesday the guards would disappear without troubling about it, and the new ones did not give us anything till Thursday. The food for each man cost twenty-five kopecks a day, and as there were never less than six hundred and often over a thousand men in the transport, our little guard of ten soldiers made a handsome profit. The only Russians to treat us with perfect honesty were the Cossacks. Those of us who had money could buy as much as they liked at the stations. Food was