Odessa, as we viewed it from our ice encrusted bridge that freezing December morning, was a distinct disappointment. Behind the breakwater that stands between the pounding seas of the Euxine and the anchorage and wharves, the city lay, gray, cold, gloomy and forbidding. From the dirty streets of the shipping district the town scrambles up steeply and spreads itself out over the bleak landscape that lies beyond. Long lines of what the Europeans call “goods wagons,” and what we term freight cars, were strung along both pier and water front. A half dozen or more stranded cargo steamers chained up to the wharves, and a few dreary looking tugboats combined to make the setting of one of the most desolate scenes that I recall. An occasional figure slinking about among the cars, and a single miserable Russian sentinel that stood near one of the gray stone warehouses served only to intensify the utter loneliness of the place. Over a year before I had been in Dalny, pressing close on the heels of the invading army of Japan. Big ten-inch shells from naval turrets miles away at sea, reinforced by brigades of bristling infantry that closed in from the north, had forced the Muscovites to evacuate. The retreating columns had straggled out by the light of blazing warehouses tuned to the crash of falling timber—this destruction their own handiwork to keep Dalny out of the Japanese hands. But even that far finger of the Russian reach, obtained in crazy frenzy of expansion and abandoned in smoke and confusion, was cheerful compared to Odessa. There at least one saw the new life of the Oriental armies that poured in by brigades, divisions and army corps in the place of the retreating Russians, but here in the great commercial city of southern Russia there was a gloom, silence and abandon that spelled revolution, disorder and economic disaster, more loudly than the smoking embers of deserted Dalny. Morris, who did not indulge much in sad reflections, brought me back to the business in hand by the true, if somewhat ungrammatical observation— “There sure ain’t nothing doing ashore or afloat in these diggings, and that’s a cinch.”