The Cossack band in an adjoining room played national airs. The different kinds of glasses were emptied in as many toasts. And to my great relief, the speeches began. I say relief, because naturally, I thought the meal was over. Not so. Still the heaped salvers came. By now, I had reached the point where I could only weakly pretend to eat. My hosts watched me like hawks, insisting that I rally my appetite. They showed irritation when I demurred faintly. They demanded that I eat and drink to prove the unlimited friendship of the United States for Russia. And I wondered how our diplomats had ever survived the hospitality of such a country. At last I saw that my only hopes lay in a limit to the Cossack capacity. Again and again, I told myself, “They have reached it!”--only to realize that what I had suffered was but a prelude to the feast. At about three in the morning, the vodka and wines having been exhausted, champagne was served--in large, stein-like glasses. And a British officer who had just come to observe conditions, was startled when Irish porter showed up in stone jars. “Why!” he exclaimed, “We don’t have this at home any more! In England it’s a fond memory. And here they have it by the case!” A little supper! And there was one such about every night. I had come looking for famine: I began to fear I would die of over eating. One could be forgiven a chuckle. The staff in Vladivostok had expressed some remorse over having to send me away from a mess which boasted three courses and a choice of two canned fruits for dessert! But what about the proletariat of Chita? These officers were eating, but were the poor starving to death in cold weather? I visited the open-air free market in a square of the city. The peasants were selling cabbage, dried salmon, salmon-roe, spheres of cheese, rye and white bread in tremendous loaves, quail, partridge, pheasant, beef, pork, sausage, frozen milk and frozen soup--precisely the things I had eaten at the “little supper.”