I did not have the pleasure of paying my respects in person to General Knox, for I think he was calling on Ataman Semenoff. But I left my card. As I walked back to my hotel in the Siberian twilight, I passed a Siberian _moujik_ staggering drunkenly from the effects of vodka. And as I went on after letting him have all the road to pass me, I philosophized in an amateur way in this wise: What is the difference between this Siberian _moujik_ and me? Why should I feel myself his superior? Was it anything that I myself had done? No. The difference between me and the drunken Siberian _moujik_ lay entirely in the fact that I had been luckier than he in my ancestors. My progenitors established, and left to me a form of government which meant opportunity instead of oppression. I had begun life as a factory boy, but not as the descendant of a line of ignorant serfs. The men and women of my race who had stood for freedom ages before I was born, were now dust in ancient graves. They had wrested from King John of England the Great Charter of human liberties, and from German George the Third, freedom for the American colonies. The _moujik_ had only just begun to think of freedom, and was making rather a mess of the job. If his ancestors had begun to fight for freedom a thousand years before, I would not be in Siberia wondering what was to be done. This was the real Siberian twilight--the twilight which precedes the sunlight of full freedom, a twilight which reveals queer goblins, and bizarre shapes burning and slaying through the night which must come and pass before dawn. These musings were undoubtedly due to having been entertained by the kindly Oba, and then the startling contrast of having been made to feel at home with the hospitable British--or maybe it was the raw shark I had eaten which made my mind wander. XVIII DIPLOMACY AND--MICE In a previous chapter I mentioned Captain B----, a Russian serving in Semenoff’s forces, who had his room in the Hotel Select full of food. This officer, and his wife, a frail little woman who had been desperately ill and was still in the convalescent stage, became my closest friends in Chita. Every afternoon at four I was in their room for tea, and Mrs. B----, who was an accomplished musician, played Russian operas and sang. The piano had been borrowed from the wife of a Russian doctor living in the hotel. Mrs. B----’s few sheets of music were all that were left to her from a large collection, after several encounters with Bolshevists, in which the most of her baggage had been stolen or confiscated. This couple had spent the previous year in flights from various cities. They had escaped from Odessa, from Ekaterinburg, from Irkutsk--from countless places. And many times they were in deadly peril.