over-gilt, over-decorated restaurant, humming with the clatter of
plates and the chatter of high-pitched Argentine voices, as a noisy
string-band played selections from the latest Paris operette. It was
difficult to realise that this ostentatiously modern town, with its
meretricious glitter, and its population of pale-faced town-breds, was
only a hundred miles from the place where, amongst brown, sunburnt
folk, we had been living a primitive life tempered by quiet
transplanted English comfort.

To me there is always something rather attractive in sudden contrasts
in surroundings. My memory goes back forty years to Russia, when I was
on a bear-shooting expedition with Sir Robert Kennedy. Kennedy had
killed two bears, and we were making our way back to Petrograd that
night, for next evening there was to be one of the famous "Bals des
Palmiers" at the Winter Palace which we neither of us wished to miss.
So it came about that one evening we were sitting in a two-roomed
peasant's house, thigh-booted and flannel-shirted, in the roughest of
clothes, devouring sustenance for our night's sledge journey out of
pieces of newspaper by the light of a little smoky oil-lamp, whilst
around us stood half the village, whispering endless comments, and
gaping open-eyed on those mysterious strangers from the unknown world
outside Russia. The room was lined with rough unpainted boards nailed
over the log walls; one quarter of it was occupied by a huge stove, on
the top of which the children were sleeping; it was very dirty, and
the heat in combination with the fetid atmosphere was almost
unendurable. A dimly lit picture, all in sombre browns, relieved by
the scarlet shirts of the men, and the gaudy printed calicoes of the
women, just visible in the uncertain light of the flickering lamp, and
of the red glow from the stove. Then came an all-night drive in
sledges through the interminable forest of pines, the piercing cold