good and cheap in those days. A pound of roast mutton cost fifteen kopecks, a roast fowl forty to fifty kopecks, a roast duck a rouble, besides there was white, grey, and black bread, every sort of roll and biscuit, cheese, ham, bacon, butter, milk, and many sorts of excellent fish. Each station was a new adventure, where you explored strange and unknown sorts of food. Sugar became rarer the further east we went, and at some stations could only be supplied to soldiers; but we always had a supply. [SN: GERMAN SOCIALISTS] We were a very mixed company, thirty, sometimes forty, men in a luggage van. We were mostly working-men, and the relations between them and the educated classes were very bad. They bore a grudge against us for being what we were, and tried by all sorts of pinpricks to make life a burden to us. The working-man dearly likes overheated rooms, possibly because it is a luxury he cannot afford at home. They would go on piling coal on the fire till the truck was like a furnace; in the pitiless, unbearable heat our brains would seem to be bursting, and we would throw off nearly all our clothes. When they had got us so far, the working-men would suddenly open the windows and let in on us the icy Siberian winter air with its temperature of twenty or thirty degrees below zero. We knew exactly what to expect from them if ever they should get the upper hand in the State. The Socialists ruled among them unquestioned. They would hold forth by the hour and no one of their class said a word against them. The chief use of the German Army seemed to be as an institution for the diffusion of Socialism throughout the whole nation. Our labourers were mostly inclined to be rough bullies, but they were cowards, and let anybody alone who showed fight. None of them were above cringing, fawning, or begging. It used to disgust me to see men wearing the uniform of a great army begging for pitiful odds and ends that they did not really need. Their philosophy was simple. If they wanted a thing, they must have it; if they could not beg or wheedle it out of its owner, they must steal it.