of a number of
officers, especially as we were in the very act of attempting to part
with our much-beloved mother country, of which act, to judge by the
pains it took to make it difficult, the government did not approve. It
was a natural fear in us, as you can easily see. Pretty soon mother
recovered herself, and remembering that the train stops for a few
minutes only, was beginning to put away the scattered articles hastily
when a gendarme entered our car and said we were not to leave it. Mamma
asked him why, but he said nothing and left the car, another gendarme
entering as he did so. He demanded where we were going, and, hearing the
answer, went out. Before we had had time to look about at each other's
frightened faces, another man, a doctor, as we soon knew, came in
followed by a third gendarme.

The doctor asked many questions about our health, and of what
nationality we were. Then he asked about various things, as where we
were going to, if we had tickets, how much money we had, where we came
from, to whom we were going, etc., etc., making a note of every answer
he received. This done, he shook his head with his shining helmet on it,
and said slowly (I imagined he enjoyed frightening us), "With these
third class tickets you cannot go to America now, because it is
forbidden to admit emigrants into Germany who have not at least second
class tickets. You will have to return to Russia unless you pay at the
office here to have your tickets changed for second class ones." After a
few minutes' calculation and reference to the notes he had made, he
added calmly, "I find you will need two hundred rubles to get your
tickets exchanged;" and, as the finishing stroke to his pleasing
communication, added, "Your passports are of no use at all now because
the necessary part has to be torn out, whether you are allowed to pass
or not." A plain, short speech he made of it, that cruel man. Yet every
word sounded in our ears with an awful sound that stopped the beating of
our hearts for a while--sounded like the ringing of funeral bells to us,
and yet without the mournfully sweet music those bells make, that they
might heal while they hurt.

We were homeless, houseless, and friendless in a strange place. We had
hardly money enough to last us through the voyage for which we had hoped
and waited for three long years. We had suffered much that the reunion
we longed for might come about; we had prepared ourselves to suffer more
in orde