The day is beautiful and the compartment is all my own-- I am absolutely enchanted with the Tyrol-- I have never seen such quaint picture book houses and mills with wheels like that in the Good for Nothing and crucifixes wonderfully carved and snow mountains and dark green forests-- The sky is perfect and the air is filled with the sun and the train moves so smoothly that I can see little blue flowers, baby blue, Bavarian blue flowers, in the Spring grass.

Such dear old castles like birds nests and such homelike old mills and red-faced millers with feathers in their caps you never saw out of a comic opera-- The man in here with me now is a Russian, of course, and saw the last Coronation and knows that my suite is on the principal Street and attends to my changing money and getting an omelette-- I can survive another night now having had an omelette not so good as Madam Masi's but still an omelette-- I have now left Munich and the Russian and a conductor whom I mistook for a hereditary prince of Bavaria, with tassels down his back, has assured me he is going to Berlin, and that I am going to Berlin and much else to which I smile knowingly and say mucho gracia, wee wee, ya ya, ich ich limmer and other long speeches ending with "an er--" DICK.
May 15th, 1896.

Moscow.
DEAR CHAS: We left Berlin Monday night at eleven and slept well in a wagon-lit.
That was the only night out of the five that I spent in the cars that I had my clothes off, although I was able to stretch out on the seats, so I am cramped and tired now.

At seven Monday morning the guard woke us and told us to get ready for the Custom House and I looked out and saw a melancholy country of green hills and black pines and with no sign of human life.

It was raining and dreary looking and then I saw as we passed them a line of posts painted in black and white stripes a half mile apart on each side of the train and I knew we had crossed the boundary and that the line of posts stretched from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea and from the Pacific to the Caucasus Mountains and the Pamirs.