She talked with the women as they walked, learned their pitiful stories, and gave them much wise counsel which they accepted for the sake of her brick tea, and remembered long after she and her tea had passed out of their lives. She argued with them day by day, and scolded them by night, for their many and obtrusively undeniable sins of omission and commission. She saved many a tiny life by her care and insistence. That, indeed, was a doubtful benefit to the little ones themselves, but she could not stand by and see them die. And, by her own words and her own high courage, she strengthened into hopefulness many a heart that was weary to death of its load and embittered with the bearing of it. But each day now brought brighter weather, and to that extent softened the asperities of the road. The birches and poplars fluttered trembling welcomes as they passed, as though they feared the law might take official cognizance of more; the children began to stray outside the slow-moving line to gather bunches of forget-me-nots and wild roses, and Hope's sore heart was gladdened and her eyes filled as the shy little tokens of their remembrance were tendered her. The aspect of the country surprised her greatly. She had thought of Siberia as a mighty desert of snow and ice and desolate wastes. But here were great sweeps of growing corn, and pastures and farmsteadings. There were rolling rivers and rustling forests. They walked in clouds of dust and the children picked flowers by the wayside. But this was midsummer, and Siberia in summer and Siberia in winter are as different as heaven and hell. CHAPTER X HOW THREE PASSED WITHOUT MEETING "On the Volga there is a Cliff," but the bureaucrats, for reasons of their own, object to all mention of it. For it recalls a glorious time, long since, when the bureaucrats went under, and for a space a free man ruled a free race--even in Russia. And the would-be-frees still sing of that time long since--but they sing of it below their breath, for the ears of the bureaucrats are long and their hands are heavy. There are cliffs also on the Yenisei, blue and fair, across the mile-wide stretch of swift-flowing water; and these cliffs, too, are known to free men, and known still better to those who are not free. In a cleft of the hills on the eastern bank, three free men lay in the sun and watched the slow, methodic passage of the pendulum ferry as it swung to and fro from bank to bank. It was loaded to the brim each time it left the further bank and it went back empty. But the crowd on this side grew but slowly, and the packed mass on the other side seemed undiminished by the stolid bites of the big black boat. "Da!" said one of the men in the cleft. "There is no end to them." "It is the first party of the season. They have been piling up," said one of the others. "Women, too, and children," said the third, and thought of one woman and a possible child.