Out there in the silver twilight of the white night she lay, a forest of flaming church steeples and giant factory chimneys, rising vaguely from the marshes. I pressed my face closer to the dust-crusted windowpane and searched the flying landscape. There on the edge of the East she waited for us, strange, mysterious, inscrutable, compelling--a candle drawing us on from the ends of the earth like so many fluttering moths. Twelve long, hot, dusty days the Trans-Siberian Express had been crawling toward her,--crawling like a snake across flower-strewn steppe and velvet forest,--the one unclean thing upon this new-born world of spring. I glanced at my wrist-watch--it was twenty minutes past two on a morning in early June of the year 1917. Here we were, despite war and revolution, peeping into Peter’s “Window” only four hours behind schedule. Involuntarily I breathed a tiny sigh of disappointment. Nothing, nothing, had happened. Even the dreary, desolate Siberian wastes had failed to live up to their promise. Six thousand versts of emerald meadows, cut with shimmering china-blue waterways, stretched behind us. Six thousand versts of meadows, covered with a mist of wild flowers--pink, mauve, and flaming yellow--and broken frequently with deep woods, where silver birches played like sunshine against the shadowed background of dusky pines--that was Siberia. At every log station, with its red flags and its row of poplars, a crowd of front-bound soldiers, in worn, dun-colored uniforms, tried to board the train, only to settle peacefully back to more interminable hours of waiting when the Committee of Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies, traveling with us, had explained the necessity. Occasionally in the night we were suddenly awakened, when the door of our compartment was thrown open by a guard searching for an escaped Austrian prisoner. Otherwise, the monotony of our journey had remained unbroken. Well, it was done. Ten minutes more, and Petrograd would open the door of a new world to us. I glanced down the car at a row of passionate faces flattened against the windows, while hungry eyes drank deep of once familiar scenes. They were home-bound exiles, these companions of mine, going back to a land whose door had long been closed in their faces. Home! Every click of the wheels carried me farther and farther away from that scrap of earth on the other side of the world which I called home. My mind wandered back to that sunny day, two months before, when through a mist of tears I had watched the hills of California disappear behind the Golden Gate. How blithely I had come away! Blithely, because I knew that mine was a land where the latch-string was always out, and I could go back again at a moment’s choosing. I tried to think what it must be to be coming home to the land of the bolted door, to the land of the black scowl--the land that had suddenly thrown down its bars and turned a friendly, smiling face and open arms toward the lonely outcasts.