Returning from the Trans-Baikal, I saw a sick man attempt to purchase a bottle of milk from farm women who had set up a little market near the Androvka station. The women were peasants. Their heads were wrapped in old shawls. In the sixty-degrees-below-zero temperature, their breath came like plumes of white smoke from their nostrils. They looked at the sick man’s money and folded their arms, refusing to take it. “But it is good in Nikolsk,” he pleaded. “Then go to Nikolsk and spend it,” they returned. Shivering and hungry, the sick man climbed back into the coupé of his car. His pockets were full and his stomach was empty! He was as helpless as old King Midas. In Siberia, a country fairly underlaid with precious metals--gold, silver, platinum and copper--there is no metal money to be seen. In fact coins are a curiosity, and even the beggar’s metal kopeck has disappeared. Where is this money? Hidden in the niches between the logs of huts, buried under frozen cabbages, sewed into ragged clothes. And anything takes its place. In Chita, in the _sobrania_, or city club, playing cards passed as currency--on them their denomination marked by a rubber stamp. (And now you find yourself longing for a rubber stamp!) At one shop, I offered coupons cut from Imperial bonds. Such coupons being good everywhere, I had faith in them. But, alas, mine were declined. What did a close reading of the small Russian type reveal? The canny bond-holder had clipped his coupons and put them into circulation a little prematurely. And if I wanted to spend them, I had only to wait a small matter of six Siberian winters. The coupons were not due for payment till 1925! (If a Czar ever comes back to the throne of Russia, he is that many coupons ahead!) The postage-stamp money is the greatest nuisance of all. It is ungummed, and may be termed cubist cash, for it is wrapped into cubes bound round by a paper band. These cubes are popularly supposed to contain two rubles’ worth of ten-kopeck stamps, and “2R” is written on each band. The trusting stranger does not question the value of the packets. Few people ever remove the bands to verify. This is left to the tireless and over-suspicious Chinese. And it is invariably your bland-faced laundryman who shows you that your packets are short. From another aspect, the broken cubes have their drawback. They are little and elusive, these stamps. Your cold fingers are all thumbs. So it is fatal to attempt to do business with stamps in a brisk wind.