As a model-village you could scarcely imagine any sight more hopeless than the Marki of today. The stillness of death is in the streets. The chimneys are breathless. The people are lean, famine-fevered shadows. There is no laughter. No stir. Funerals are too common to cause excitement. While the machinery rots in the mill, men's souls rot in their bodies. From a place which was once throbbing with energy the incentive to endeavour has seeped away. There is no possibility to work; and if there were, there is not the strength to undertake it. And yet there is one building which shelters a gleam of hope—the school-house in which the American Relief has established its children's feeding station. It was Mr. Whitehead, part-owner of the pillaged mill, who led me to it. “If you have any ability,” he said, “to make conditions known, I wish you would tell the world what Marki owes to America. Six hundred children died of hunger in our village the year before the Americans came. Whatever happens to us older fellows, they have saved our rising generation. I am getting the money to patch up my machinery; if I live long enough, I shall have all of it running again. But shall I be able ito patch up the machinery of human bodies? My people are no more capable of working than my machinery is of running at present. Their strength has been looted. They must be repaired, just the same as the machinery in my mill.” And what I saw on a small scale in Marki is true of the whole of Poland. CHAPTER XIV—AN IMPERIAL BREAD-LINE If you can imagine the House of Lords standing in the bread-line, you will be able to picture the sight that I saw today. I suppose nothing like it has been seen since the French Revolution—no reversal of social fortunes half so tragic and poignantly dramatic. It was an object lesson to anyone who believes that aristocracy is anything more than environment. What I really saw was the Imperial Russian Court in miniature. The lady who introduced me was the wife of the Tsar's High Chamberlain, Madame Lubinoff. Her husband, at the commencement of the war, was Civil Governor of Warsaw. Her home was a palace, which is now occupied by Poland's peasant Prime Minister. Today her husband is her secretary at the soup-kitchen which she conducts for the Russian Red Cross; her home is as humble as an artisan's; the people to whom she ministers are princes and princesses in burst out boots and tatters. I had been told of the wonderful work which Madame Lubinoff has done for her exiled compatriots. I had also been told that her work was soon to be abandoned; that she had sold almost the last of her jewels and that the funds with which the Russian Red Cross at Paris had provided her had given out.