It has been a bleak early spring with snow on the uplands of Thrace. For those who travel from Paris to Constantinople on that Western moving shuttle, the Orient Express, there would be nothing to trouble the mind unpleasantly--except in that the more comfortable we are, the more we demand and the more we grumble. But if you travel by the ordinary unheated train, where even the first-class carriages are more or less bereft of glass and have the windows loosely boarded up with bits of old packing-cases, you taste something of the persistent northern wind which blows down sleet and rain from the Black Sea, from Russia, as it were Russian unhappiness it was blowing down. You arrive at Sofia at midnight in torrents of rain. You take a cab and visit every hotel, large or small, in the Bulgarian capital, and are refused. People are already sleeping three or four in a room, sleeping in outhouses and bath-rooms, refugee Bulgars from the lost Bulgar territories, refugee Turks, refugee Russians. You return to the station and it is closed for the night, and you have a wordy discussion with the eternal cabman as to whether you shall pay a hundred or two hundred francs--Bulgarian francs or levas which are, however, worth a bare three-farthings each to-day. You find shelter in a wayside cafe which is half cafe, half guard-house for the town patrol. Soldiers are stretched out snoring on the floor. Five levas to sit up, ten to lie down! By that time of night you are fain to lie down. A dreary journey on to Philippopolis and Svilengrad, with the wind lashing the train, lashing it all the way to the Chataldja lines and the zone of Allied control. Eight passport examinations, eight examinations of your baggage, plentiful two, three, and four-hour stops, a land of ruined railway stations and bare hills, and only late on the second evening after Sofia do you creep into the imperial city.