On two adjoining seats are Ephrinell and Miss Horatia Bluett.  Their talk is of nothing but figures.  I don’t know if the practical American murmurs at the ear of the practical Englishwoman the adorable verse which made the heart of Lydia palpitate: 

“Nee tecum possum vivere sine te,”

but I do know that Ephrinell can very well live without me.  I have been quite right in not reckoning on his company to charm away the tedium of the journey.  The Yankee has completely “left” me—­that is the word—­for this angular daughter of Albion.

I reach the platform.  I cross the gangway and I am at the door of the second car.

In the right-hand corner is Baron Weissschnitzerdoerfer.  His long nose—­this Teuton is as short-sighted as a mole—­rubs the lines of the book he reads.  The book is the time-table.  The impatient traveler is ascertaining if the train passes the stations at the stated time.  Whenever it is behind there are new recriminations and menaces against the Grand Transasiatic Company.

In this car there are also the Caternas, who have made themselves quite comfortable.  In his cheery way, the husband is talking with a good deal of gesticulation, sometimes touching his wife’s hands, sometimes putting his arms round her waist; and then he turns his head toward the platform and says something aside.  Madame Caterna leans toward him, makes little confused grimaces, and then leans back into the corner and seems to reply to her husband, who in turn replies to her.  And as I leave I hear the chorus of an operetta in the deep voice of Monsieur Caterna.

In the third car, occupied by many Turkomans and three or four Russians, I perceive Major Noltitz.  He is talking with one of his countrymen.  I will willingly join in their conversation if they make me any advances, but I had better maintain a certain reserve; the journey has only begun.

I then visit the dining car.  It is a third longer than the other cars, a regular dining room, with one long table.  At the back is a pantry on one side, a kitchen on the other, where the cook and steward are at work, both of them Russians.  This dining car appears to me capitally arranged.  Passing through it, I reach the second part of the train, where the second-class passengers are installed.  Kirghizes who do not look very intelligent with their depressed heads, their prognathous jaws stuck well out in front, their little beards, flat Cossack noses and very brown skins.  These wretched fellows are Mahometans and belong either to the Grand Horde wandering on the frontier between China and Siberia, or to the Little Horde between the Ural Mountains and the Aral Sea.  A second-class car, or even a third-class car, is a palace for these people, accustomed to the encampments on the Steppes, to the miserable “iourts” of villages.  Neither their beds nor their seats are as good as the stuffed benches on which they have seated themselves with true Asiatic gravity.