The first night I went to the _sobrania_ I was amazed. It was a large stone building of four stories and basement. The basement contained billiard and coat-rooms. On the floor above was a ball-room and a theater. The next upper floor held a splendid restaurant, decorated by the inevitable and luxurious rubber plants. A German war-prisoner orchestra served for balls, theater, and after-theater supper. The plays were acted by a fairly good stock company, and it was said, written by the wife of a local general. If the latter were true she was an accomplished dramatist, though I doubt if the police would have allowed her plays to run on Broadway. It is probable that the general’s wife did write some of them, but more likely that such as I saw she had adapted from French farces. They were grossly nasty, to such an extent that it was evident that they had been coarsened. Infidelity, of course, was the basis of each one, the wife always being the fool. And one case of infidelity was not enough for a single play--all the characters were involved in some way or another, to the uproarious delight of the audience. And incidentally, I saw high school children put on a play built around a button missing from the most vital part of a man’s trousers. No further comment needs to be made upon the public morals of the Siberians. Yet curiously enough, in all the dancing I observed, there was not a hint of anything approaching the suggestive. In fact, the dances were most pretty, and most decorous. This might be explained by the fact that the officers of Semenoff’s little army were always armed, and are as quick with a pistol as the old-style Westerner of our own country. Discretion in such cases is not always a matter of morals. And while I am discussing the morals of the Siberians, I wish to say that before sailing from San Francisco I went to a noted restaurant for dinner, where the prominent people of the city dine. There I saw a woman dance in a state so close to nudity that it was disgusting, and she did not dance upon a stage, but among the tables. She was on the program as a foreigner, a gipsy, I think. Thus as a nation we are willing to be Orientalized. And our best people go farther in permitting offense in dancing than do the Siberians, judging from what I saw in that country.