smoking group of dark-faced men hanging round the entrance.

Inside, the car was thick, indeed, with smoke and the heavy exhalations
of the night. Men and women were sitting on the wooden benches; some
women were cooking in the tiny stove-room attached to the car; children,
half naked and unwashed, were playing on the floor; here and there a man
was still asleep; while one old man was painfully conning a paper of
"Homestead Regulations" which had been given him at Montreal, a lad of
eighteen helping him; and close by another lad was writing a letter, his
eyes passing dreamily from the paper to the Canadian landscape outside,
of which he was clearly not conscious. In a corner, surrounded by three
or four other women, was the mother they had come to seek. She held a
wailing baby of about a year old in her arms. At the sight of Elizabeth,
the child stopped its wailing, and lay breathing fast and feebly, its
large bright eyes fixed on the new-comer. The mother turned away
abruptly. It was not unusual for persons from the parlour-cars to ask
leave to walk through the emigrants'.

But Elizabeth's companion said a few words to her, apparently in
Russian, and Elizabeth, stooping over her, held out the milk. Then a
dark face reluctantly showed itself, and great black eyes, in deep,
lined sockets; eyes rather of a race than a person, hardly conscious,
hardly individualised, yet most poignant, expressing some feeling,
remote and inarticulate, that roused Elizabeth's. She called to the
conductor for a cup and a spoon; she made her way into the malodorous
kitchen, and got some warm water and sugar; then kneeling by the child,
she put a spoonful of the diluted and sweetened milk into the
mother's hand.

* * * * *