It gets colder at the suggestion. The three starting-bells ring, and everybody scrambles into the compartments. The express rolls onward down the Urals. You stroll back to the warm dining-room and idly watch the groups around. Across the way is an elderly mild-looking officer, whose gold epaulettes, zig-zagged with silver furrows, are the insignia of a major-general. He smokes endless cigarettes in company with another officer lesser in degree, a major, decorated with the Russo-Japanese service-medal, smart of carriage and alert of look. By the window beyond is a young German, gazing meditatively at the hills and the snow through the bottom of a glass of Riga beer. A rather bright-mannered dame, with rings on her fingers and long pendants in her ears, chats vivaciously in French with a phlegmatic-looking personage in a tight-fitting blue coat which buttons up to his throat like a fencer’s jacket. A quietly-dressed gentleman, evidently in civil life, is reading one of the library copies of de Maupassant. Outside, cut and tunnel, hill, slope, and valley, green forest, white drifted snow, and bare craggy rocks, the Urals glide past. The little track-wardens’ stations beside the way snap back as if jerked by a sudden hand, and the telegraph-poles catch up in endless monotony the sagging wires. The Tatar waiter goes from place to place, clearing off the ashes and the glasses, and getting ready for dinner. There is a table-d’hôte repast, the Russian _obeid_, a meal which starts with a fiery vodka gulp any time after noon, and tails off in the falling shadows of the winter sunset with tea and cigarettes. Or, if one wishes, he may press the bell, labeled in the Græco-Slavonic lettering, “Buffet,” and dine à la carte. “Il vaut mieux essayer le repas Russe,” says the quiet reader of de Maupassant, joining you. He is duly thanked for the advice, and we beckon to the aproned waiter. At once the latter passes the countersign kitchenward to set the meal in motion, and puts before us the little liqueur-glasses and the bottle of vodka. While we still gasp and blink over this, he has gotten the cold _zakuska_ of black rye-bread and butter, _sardinka_, salty _beluga_, and cold ham, and has started us on the first course. Then comes in, after the omni-inclusive _zakuska_, a big pot of cabbage-soup which we are to season with a swimming spoonful of thick sour cream. The chunky pieces of half-boiled meat floating in it are left high and dry by the consumption of the liquid. The meat becomes the third course, which we garnish with mustard and taste. “Voyons!” the Frenchman observes. “Of the Russian cuisine and its method of preparing certain food-substances one may not approve. Frankly it calls for the sauce of a prodigious appetite. But contemplating the _obeid_ as an institution so evolved as to fit into the general scheme of life, it finds merit. The Russian meal is a guide to Russian character.”