At last I tried to sleep, but the atmosphere in the carriage, of
smoke, babies, stale clothes, and the peculiar smell of the
Russian peasantry which no one who has known it can
forget, made sleep impossible. But I travelled fairly
comfortably, resolutely shutting my ears to the talk, thinking
of fishing in England, and shifting from one bone to another
as each ached in turn from contact with the plank on which I
lay.





FIRST DAYS IN MOSCOW



It was a rare cold day when I struggled through the crowd
out of the station in Moscow, and began fighting with the
sledge-drivers who asked a hundred roubles to take me to
the Metropole. I remembered coming here a year ago with
Colonel Robins, when we made ten roubles a limit for the
journey and often travelled for eight. To-day, after heated
bargaining, I got carried with no luggage but a typewriter for
fifty roubles. The streets were white with deep snow, less
well cleaned than the Petrograd streets of this year but better
cleaned than the Moscow streets of last year. The tramways
were running. There seemed to be at least as many sledges
as usual, and the horses were in slightly better condition than
last summer when they were scarcely able to drag