You send a card in through one of the attachés. In a few minutes there is delivered to you the Prince’s card, across which is written: “At noon.” At the hour appointed you mount to the apartment overlooking the Bolshoiskaia. Guards at salute, staff in brilliant uniforms, secretaries and callers in full dress,--the antechambers are full. You pass through to the furthermost room. In a nest of books and maps, with blue-prints outspread on floor and chairs and sofas, is an elderly man in a plain frock-coat, without a ribbon or a button to hint his honors. He is vigorous, hearty, simple, almost unchanged from your earlier acquaintance, his keen flashing eyes hinting ever a reverse side to the great repose of his manner. Personal questions occupy the first minutes, but presently we are into larger themes, and you begin to feel subtly the man’s power. He has come on a special tour, to inspect, with his own practiced eyes, the projected double-tracking of the Siberian Railroad. Every brakeman and locomotive engineer, every traffic superintendent and division manager along the route knows he could step down from his private car and handle the levers and give them directions. His mind is a very vortex of ideas, and his range of conversation reflects world-wide interests. The talk gets to the American political situation and the race-problem. Later it shifts to the Japanese War, and he tells of some of his experiences getting the troops into Manchuria. A mention of the overland road to China awakens reminiscences. “It was long before the railroad that I went over that route first,” he says. He tells of his months-long horseback ride beyond Baikal before the railroad went through, inspecting the trade-route and the prospects of the country. By and by the conversation has got to the special problems of the Slav. With the straightforward frankness of a great nature which wishes the best for his country, he tells of the Russian aspirations from the standpoint of those who are facing the problems of the nation in their fact and practice. “I too,” he says, “was once for changing much in a little time, and worked to free the serfs and to start the elective Semstvos throughout the Empire. Alas! so much that they want is possible to no government! One cannot by enactment abolish want or bring all men to a _niveau_. We are trying to give every man the chance to rise, unchecked by any administrative barrier. But one sees as he lives longer that all which one wishes cannot come at a _coup_. Great changes, great improvements, I have witnessed, but they have not come by violence. We must keep order, and hand on to our sons an undivided Empire of the Russias.” You leave this patient builder of the new order alone amid his maps and studies in the idle Sunday city. As you descend the steps, a black-capped student passes the door. He is humming the forbidden _Marseillaise_. IV SLEDGING THROUGH TRANSBAIKALIA