The Siberian put the cabbage on the ground, and emboldened by the passive attitude of the Japanese, once more ran in pursuit, and extracted from the other bucket, another cabbage. Having emptied the buckets of the forager, he departed with his cabbages. I wondered if he would have been allowed to regain his property if I had not been with the Japanese. In this connection, peasants always came to my interpreter with complaints against the Japanese. But our orders were to give no heed to such complaints--in fact, not to listen to them. There were tales of murder, robbery, outrage, of isolated districts in which Japanese soldiers drove the people from their homes, and took the dwellings as quarters, confiscating all money and property in possession of the people. I can only cite the fact that these stories were told; the truth of them is a matter I am not competent to discuss. Early in the morning we were back in Botchkereva, and stopped there while the horses were fed and watered. I went to the station restaurant for tea. There I found a young lieutenant of the Twenty-seventh Infantry, who had left Khabarovsk two days later than I did, in an effort to find Major Miller’s force. His name was D----, and he was shivering from the cold, for it was not time to begin the sale of tea and food, though the girls were sleepily washing the floors, and firing up the samovars. A throng of refugees were standing about, patiently waiting for the hour to arrive when they might get something hot. My interpreter and I were thoroughly chilled, but no amount of money would induce the slatternly girls to give us even hot water from the samovars--it lacked a half an hour before they would begin to serve anything. I looked at the men, women and children huddled together in corners, some of them shivering so violently that their teeth chattered, and poor, under-nourished and illy-clad children crying from cold. Why the attendants must observe such regular hours, under such conditions, I could not understand, and never will. It may be that it was a demonstration of the “rosy conditions of Soviet Russia,” which an American referred to recently in a speech at Madison Square Garden, New York, at which the beauties of the Bolshevist régime were extolled. But I wish to call attention to the fact that those who did the extolling of the Bolshevist régime were not enjoying that régime in Russia--they were enduring the hardships of the “capitalistic United States.”