frontier we were
met by guards on horseback and on foot, policemen, detectives and other
grafters, who took our passports and money, and one fellow made me
exchange my socks with him. Then they imprisoned us in a stable with
some cows until they could hold a coroner's inquest on our passports and
divide our money. We slept with the cows the first night in Russia, and
I do not want to sleep again with animals that chew cuds all night, and
get up half a dozen times to hump up their backs and stretch and bellow.
We never slept a wink, and could look out through the cracks in the
stable and see the guards shaking dice for our money.

[Illustration: See the guards shaking dice for our money 253]

Finally they looked at the great seal on our passports and saw it was an
American document, and they began to turn pale, as pale as a Russian
can get without using soap, and when I said, "Washington, embassador,
minister plenipotentiary, Roosevelt, Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight, E
Pluribus Unum, whoopla, San Juan Hill," and pointed to dad, who was just
coming out of the stable, looking like Washington at Valley Forge, the
guards and other robbers bowed to dad, gave him a bag full of Russian
money in place of that which they had taken away, and let us take a
freight train for St. Petersburg, and they must have told the train men
who we were, because everybody on the cars took off their hats to us,
and divided their lunch with us.

Dad could not understand the change in the attitude of the people
towards us until I told him that they took him for a distinguished
American statesman, and that as long as we were in Russia he must try
to look like George Washington and act like Theodore Roosevelt, so every
little while dad would stand up in the aisle of the car and pose like
George Washington and when anybody gave him a sandwich or a cigarette
he would show his teeth and say, "Deelighted," and all the way to St.
Petersburg dad carried out his part of the programme and we were not
robbed once on the trip, but dad tried to smoke one of the cigarettes
that was given him by a Cossack, and he died in my arms, pretty near.

They make cigarettes out of baled hay that has been used for beddings
and covered with paper that has been used to poison flies. I never
smelled anything so bad since they fumigated our house by the board of
health after the hired girl had smallpox.

Well, we got to St. Petersburg in an awful time, and went to a hotel