Without argument, I piled my baggage in, clambered aboard, and then paid him his proper twenty rubles at the end of the journey. He did not demur--such methods proved to him that I was a personage not to be trifled with. Had I given him thirty, he would have chased me all night to get the other thirty, for to display weakness by over-payment puts one down as a person who can be brow-beaten and robbed. Generosity in Siberia stamps the stranger as a fool. And as a matter of fact, I paid him double rate, for the Imperial rubles I gave him were worth about twice the local paper money. There was still a detachment beyond the Amur River, about twenty versts away, which I had not visited. Colonel Styer gladly provided me with a horse, and a mounted orderly to ride to this station, saving me the two days necessary to make the trip by trains. And the Chaplain of the Twenty-seventh, a hard-riding and hard-praying Southerner representative of our best type of army chaplains, said that he would go with me. The trip was arranged while I was dining as the guest of Colonel Styer and Chaplain W----. Once more I was in quarters with Lieutenant-Colonel Morrow, the regimental captain-adjutant, S----, and a second lieutenant, W----, who had been commissioned from the ranks after several years in the regular army. The building was large and roomy, having formerly been the residence of a Russian officer and his family while a regiment of Siberian Rifles had been stationed in Khabarovsk in the old days. We used their silver and furniture, their rich table covers, candelabra and samovars. The walls of the house are four feet thick, with hollow spaces between connected with the flues of the many great stoves, in such way that the smoke and heat from the fires circulate between the walls before escaping from the chimneys. Fifty and sixty degrees below zero are said to be usual winter temperature there. A stove in Siberia is not a stove at all, to use a Hibernism, but a sort of tile temple built into the wall, reaching from the floor to the ceiling. The front of this structure merges with the surface of the wall, and the tiles being of various colors and designs, they add to the interior decorations. And it is startling to come in of a cool evening and touch a wall hot enough to suggest frying eggs upon it. My memories of that house are permeated by a kindly old Russian _moujik_, with long reddish beard, long hair, wrinkled and blinking eyes. Whenever one had occasion to pass him, he abased himself--he was a most pathetic demonstration of the Russian style of turning service into servitude. He seemed to spend all the day and night stuffing wood into the fireboxes.