dangerous policy.  Colonel Semianoff is only half Russian, his mother being a Mongolian woman of high birth.  He speaks Mongolian perfectly, and the Mongolians claim him for their own.  Semianoff admitted to me personally that he had been subsidised all through by Japan.  It was the Japanese who called the Mongolian princes together and prevailed upon them to offer Semianoff the title of Emperor of Mongolia.  He had other fish to fry, however, but when his other schemes fail, as I think they must, he will be quite ready to play the Japanese game in Mongolia as faithfully as he did in Siberia.  Semianoff will be the puppet, but Japan will pull the strings; that at least is their hope and belief.

About thirty versts west of Manchuli our train was stopped by a red flag, and a railway workman informed us of a raid upon a homestead by the side of the railway, the robbers having decamped two hours before our arrival.  The father had two bullets through his chest and one through the right side of his neck, and had crawled a distance of over a verst to give information.  He was taken up on our train, and we went forward to the scene of the tragedy.  In the small wooden house, covered with loose feathers, lay the dead body of the mother with her unborn baby, near by lay a girl of about ten with her head terribly wounded.  In an outhouse was the body of their Chinese boy.  My hospital orderly rendered what aid was possible to the girl, who was carried by Madame Frank to my carriage for conveyance to the hospital at Manchuli.  A civilian doctor declared both cases hopeless, and the depositions of the man were taken.  Briefly thus: 

When the Bolsheviks first occupied Manchuli a railway workman of anarchist tendencies was appointed Soviet Commissar of the district.  Afterwards, when the Bolshevik power was destroyed and their forces were driven off the railway, the Bolshevik bands took to the forest, some engaging in running contraband over the Chinese frontier, others forming themselves into bands who not only robbed the isolated peasantry, but forced young men to join them, and afterwards levied toll upon large villages and small towns.  About three in the morning this Bolshevik Commissar knocked at the cottage door and asked the father to let him come in, as he was very tired, having had a long journey with contraband.  Believing him to be alone, the man opened the door.  The room was immediately filled with armed men, who demanded his savings or his life.  The commissar, from his knowledge of such matters, believing his savings to be in the feather pillow, ripped it open and found 4,600 roubles.  Having collected all the other small articles of value in the house, these innocent children of the Revolution held consultation on the necessity of killing everybody who knew them to be Bolsheviks, so that the crime should be cast upon the Chinese robber gangs who occasionally raid Russian territory.  This important point in the regeneration of Russia settled, they shot the