In the seat above the old man who took snuff lay a young woman, propped on her elbow. Every time I looked at her she was laughing, pressing a pomegranate seed between her lips. Her hands were very thin and white. Her face was long and thin and framed by short, clipped hair. Every now and then a young officer came up to her and took her hand, and asked if she wanted anything. She answered him indifferently, but when he went back to his seat, her eyes followed him and rested on him with the long, narrow look of a watchful cat. At noon and night we stopped at railway stations for our meals. After Bulgaria and Roumania it was bewildering to see the counters laden with hot and cold meats and vegetables and appetizing _zakouskas_, and thick _ztchee_ soup, and steaming samovars for tea. Through the open windows came refreshing puffs of wind. At the restaurant tables sat officers, rich Jews, and traveling business men--nothing much in it all to suggest war. Always, on the station walls were bright-colored portraits, in heavy gilt frames, of the Czar and Czarina and the royal family. And always in the corners of the room were ikons with candles lighted before them at night. The train always started before people had finished eating. At supper, one of the priests almost got left and had to run for it, a piece of meat-pie in one hand, the other holding up his flapping gray gown. After sunset, more and more officers and soldiers about. At stations, orderlies elbowing their way through the crowd to secure seats for their officers; officers shouting to their orderlies; officers alone or with their families, arriving with valises and bundles and pillows--enough equipment to meet any eventuality. Another night to get through somehow, sitting bolt upright in a car thick with tobacco smoke and smelling of stale food and soldiers' boots. Once we stopped for an hour out in the fields. Marie and I opened our window and stuck our heads out of doors to breathe the cool air. Extra cars had been put on during the day, and we could see the long curve of the train behind us, with the red squares of the lighted windows. There was a movement of troops, and soldiers occupied every inch of space. We could hear them singing soldier songs in parts, with pronounced rhythm and unutterably sad cadences. Some one played their accompaniment on a _balalaika_. Back and forth under our train window a woman paced restlessly. Never shall I forget the soldiers' singing to the _balalaika_, and the woman with her white face in the darkness, and the millions of stars so very far away.