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peasants' carts and a dilapidated automobile stand in the pools before the gray, empty station.

The woman

Hotel Nordbanhof. porter struggles up two narrow, steep flights of stairs with my luggage. I offer to help her, but am brusquely waved aside. Before I draw the curtains I look out the window. The streets are empty. There is a long, shrill shriek from a factory whistle. A beggar sits on the ground at a corner with his cap in front of him, silently asking alms.

The Witkowitz Coal and Iron Works near Ostrau in Czechoslovakia are the second-largest establishment of the kind in Europe. They were founded one hundred years ago at the coal mines here. All the varied operations - mining, iron-smelting, steel-making, and manufacturing-are centred in one big establishment. Vast shops, huge retorts, black furnace-stacks, and trackage cover several square kilometres. Witkowitz is a world in itself - a great organism of coal, water, ore, limestone, and gas.

Cranes reach over and pick up a carload of metal at a time. Furnaces open and pour cascades of molten iron into huge ladles, which railway cars whisk off to unknown destinations. Huge masses of incandescent steel creep across an immense hall, crawl under mammoth rollers, and come out ruby-and-black sheets, rails, and armor plates. A pipe-line makes a great circuit of several kilometres at the height of an ordinary house, carrying furnace gases to the electric power station. Every dynamo rests on its own pier, isolated from the foundations of the building in which it stands, and yet the offices shake and shudder like a ship's cabin in a storm.

These Witkowitz Works belong to two great captains of industry-Rothschild and von Guttmann. They pro

duce steel ingots, armor plates, rails, structural iron, besides such by-products as ammonia, tar, and pitch. At present they employ eighteen thousand men. During the war the number reached forty thousand. Their raw materials come from their own mines in Slovakia, Hungary, and Sweden, and they sell their output in every part of Europe.

Ostrau, which owes its importance to the works, is a typical industrial town. It has some twenty banks and a huge café where the business world assembles daily. The café is called Europa, but it should be named Palestina. New suburbs extend from the older centre in every direction, their broad avenues bordered by rows of scrawny shade-trees and low buildings with bright, gaudy signs. Soot from the iron works covers everything, so that the unshod peasant-women who bring vegetables to market go home with feet as black as Africans.

The town lies where Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Germany meet. Consequently it is an El Dorado for adventurers. Immediately after the war fabulous fortunes were made here. Factories were erected, made money for a time, went into bankruptcy, and were generally bought up for a song by the Witkowitz Works, which automatically absorb all their smaller neigh

bors.

A great gray mountain-range lies on one side of the town. It is an artificial mountain of the slag from the Witkowitz furnaces. Beyond it lies the gently rolling Moravian countryside. Horses pasture on the banks of a silvery river. Peasant girls in red jackets are getting in the hay. I am stopping with a friend in a country home surrounded by waving grainfields. Here it is always cool, even in midsummer. A fire is started in the evening, for a cold wind comes down at night from the neigh

boring mountains, whose blue outlines are visible on the horizon.

It was also raining when I arrived at Krakow, and had been for three days. Rubber coats, galoshes, umbrellas, and cabs failed to keep out the wet. So I retreated to my room in the upper story of the hotel until the deluge was over. Far away across the roofs I could see a low, dark wall- the Carpathians. When I opened the window an offensive odor rose from an undisturbed garbage-pile in the little courtyard below.

Czechs, Germans, and Hungarians have fought over Krakow; Tatars have pillaged it; epidemics and fires have ravaged it. Later it was for centuries the capital of Poland. In her golden age Copernicus taught at its university, which is older than the one in Vienna, and learning was so in honor that even the servants spoke Latin. But again foreign armies swept into the town, which lies unprotected in the great plain, and foreigners once more ruled here - first the Russians and then the Austrians. At length the World War gave Krakow back her freedom.

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Old dilapidated palaces with little Jew shops on the ground floor; wide squares and courtyards where scrawny horses eat their hay on the dirty pavements; streets where you may meet at any corner a Tatar in a round cap or a Jew in a caftan; graceful Saracenic fortress-towers; great gray steeples of Gothic churches at whose feet ancient Jewish beggar-women cower- these are the sights that first greet the stranger's eye.

The Wawel, where stands the former Palace of the Polish kings, is a height overlooking the Vistula. In the Cathedral, with its blue-and-gold dome, lie the tombs of Polish kings and heroes. To enter it is to return to the Middle Ages. Old, barefooted peasant-women with burdens on their backs kneel and

bow their foreheads to the floor beside sarcophagi where royalty lies embedded in bronze and stone. The former Palace of the Kings is a gigantic Renaissance structure surrounding an immense courtyard. Famous Italian architects designed it and Tatar warprisoners built it. To-day several hundred Polish soldiers, with shovels and wheelbarrows, are working here. The Wawel, the Kremlin of Poland, is to be restored. The Austrian Government used it as a military barracks, and the artistic treasures that once adorned its apartments were scattered to the four winds. Now they are being laboriously collected again, including the famous Jagellonian Gobelins designed from Raphael's cartoons. They hung for a time in the Warsaw Palace, and were taken from there to the Winter Palace at St. Petersburg. The Soviet Government agreed in the Riga Treaty, which ended the last Russian-Polish war, to return these treasures, but up to the present only part of them have come back.

Kusciuzko's Hill, a high pyramid of earth raised outside the city in honor of Poland's national hero, slowly disappears behind us, and we have become only a moving point on the great plain that stretches unbroken to the Ural Mountains. Even the clouds seem to have more room here, and move across the heavens slowly and majestically in great billowy masses. When you imagine for a moment that a stretch of forest or a low swell in the ground bounds your vision, you see beyond it a factory chimney or a church tower incredibly remote in the unreal distance.

The sun shines relentlessly after the long rain. Here and there are stretches of water left from a recent overflow. Horses and black, shiny cattle pasture in the meadows. Everywhere people are working in the fields - but almost

entirely women. Women also labor on the railway line with picks and shovels. When we pass they stop, look up, and wipe the perspiration from their brows, their white headcloths fluttering in the draft made by the train.

Shining lines of railway tracks stretch in great sinuous curves across the country, over fills and bridges. They often run close to the black derricks of an oil well. Gradually the fields begin to alternate with low dark pine-forests on sandy soil. The fragrance of freshly felled timber drifts into the car. We are passing an immense log-yard where thousands and thousands of moist reddish tree-trunks lie prostrate on the ground. We reach the uninterrupted plain again, where the line runs straight as a string to the horizon.

Station after station slips by. All are built in the Russian style low, long, painted white. One of them is incredibly long. It seems endless, but deserted. Just as we pull out of it, however, I catch sight of a little group of people. Broken glass lies upon the platform glittering in the sun.

Finally the train stops again at a station with green cupolas on the roof. A large town lies a short distance away. Many passengers get out. A group stand in front of a wooden shed. They look like emigrants the men in tall boots and Russian shirts, the women in bright-colored petticoats, with infants in their arms. Ragged boys run along the train with things to sell. They shout in shrill voices: 'Lemonyada!' A tiny little girl calls in an oddly deep and melodious voice: 'Voda, voda!'

During the World War a several days' battle was fought on the banks of the Vistula near Warsaw. When the Russians retreated, they took with them everything that was not nailed down. Then the Germans came and stayed more than three years. They took the copper roofs and the bells

from the churches, and the knockers from the doors- in fact, everything that was nailed down, including the nails.

To-day Warsaw's west end reminds one slightly of post-war Berlin, unkempt and run down at the heels. You see the same pale faces, the same nervous haste, the same threadbare elegance in the ladies. But everyone strives arduously to be Polish. Only Polish is spoken. Cigarettes are Polish, and remind you of Berlin again because they are not filled with tobacco. Only Polish books are in the shops. The beautiful Russian Church is being torn down because it is a reproduction of St. Basil's in the Kremlin at Moscow.

I stroll through the suburb of Praga, a straggling industrial suburb of warehouses, factories, and parks. It begins to rain and I take a droshky. Praga is connected with Warsaw proper by two great bridges across the Vistula.

The roof of my droshky sags down until it almost touches my head. I bend forward and stare at the back of the driver's ragged blue overcoat. He is a typical izvoschik of old Holy Russia. When he leans over to hurl a curse at a worthy colleague or to give his horse an undercut with his lash you realize that he would never fall off his seat even in profound slumber. It is slow business crossing the long bridge. The vehicles form a close procession there so close that the horses' noses are thrust against the carriages ahead. I amuse myself staring at the people in the droshkies going the other way: a young girl with an old sickly woman; a fat Jewish merchant with his hand on the edge of his cab displaying rings set with blue and green stones; a procession of drays; an empty, overdecorated hearse; a peasant's cart with a basket hanging behind, which the horse of the following wagon has seized with his teeth.

Below on the broad smooth Vistula a steamer whistles and moves toward the centre of the stream. People wave their hands from the flat stony bank by the landing-stage. The bridge ends near the Royal Castle in the city. The Russians are said to have carried away from its plundered apartments nearly a hundred railway cars full of furniture and works of art. I leave my droshky at this point to visit the Ghetto. Poles and Jews live in a mixed community around the old market-place below the Palace. This is a great vacant square bordered by sixteenth-century burghers' houses. Half-naked, dirty children tumble underfoot. Brightly painted picture-signs-here a huge yellow pretzel, there a cow with comically human eyes hang over the shop entrances. Polish towns must have looked this way in the old days when Poles and Cossacks wrangled on their streets and 'Jews poisoned the wells.'

The Ghetto begins in the next alley. Its dark doorways are filled with redbearded men, and a stifling, nauseating odor reeks out of its low-ceilinged shops, where huddled people labor, eat, sleep, and traffic. The family sits inside children, grandfathers, and women. The men, in caftans and earlocks, scurry hither and thither with bags on their backs and bundles in their hands, disputing, figuring, chaffering. Over what? None of them seems to own anything but his bundle or his bag. But if they once leave the Ghetto they get ahead rapidly. Soon they have a store, or a bank, or the Witkowitz Works, or are ruling Russia.

The East is a land of contrasts. One steps directly from the narrow alleys of the Ghetto into the most fashionable quarter of the city. He finds himself in a handsome square, one whole side of which is occupied by the great Wielki Theatre. Superimposed rows of columns adorn the façade. A large Greek

relief decorates the gable wall. Ghetto and palatial theatre side by side - true symbol of the Empire of the Tsars.

I wished to go directly from Warsaw to Kovno, the capital of Lithuania; but learn that in Eastern Europe two countries nominally at peace may actually be on a war footing. The neighboring republic has no diplomatic representative at Warsaw, and I can get no visé for my passport in Poland. So there is nothing for it but to detour through East Prussia or Riga. It is more convenient to go to the latter city.

'Prosze Pana' and 'Zemgale' are repeated on all sides as I struggle into the packed night-train for Riga. Prosze Pana' means about the same as 'Beg pardon, sir!' and accompanies every remark and every gesture that a man makes in Poland. You can even fire an employee with 'Prosze Pana.' And Zemgale is the border station between Poland and Latvia. Everybody on the train wants to get to Zemgale, even if he has to spend the night in the corridor. Finally I get a seat in a compartment where a lady with innumerable boxes and trunks reigns supreme. She too says 'Prosze Pana,' and 'Zemgale.'

When I awake next morning the train is pulling into Grodno. A solitary sail is visible on the Nyeman. Beyond it rises the city, perched on the high river-bank with a sky-line broken by Russian church domes. At the station of Grodno I sip for the first time a glass of boiling-hot tea

of boiling-hot tea - an excellent drink for winter. It burns my mouth a little, but is a most grateful pick-me-up after my uncomfortable night.

Northeastern Poland contracts to a narrow zone between Soviet Russia and Lithuania. Wooden houses and Russian churches are visible everywhere. The land is not quite so flat as farther south. It is a country of deep-cut watercourses, rolling uplands, and thick

impenetrable forests. Here and there I see a peasant ploughing, his share glistening in the furrow when the level rays of the morning sun strike against it.

About midday we finally reach Zemgale, where we find a different language and a different money, and change to another train after a tedious, interminable delay. It was much more convenient in the days of old Holy Russia. The weather is scorching hot. Not a breath of wind moves the limp Lett flag over the wooden station. Barefooted children play around the doorway of a neighboring cottage.

The red walls of the freight cars radiate heat.

In the next compartment to me sits an American who talks continually about Los Angeles in the broadest and most pungent Yankee dialect. He has just come up from Rumania or Turkey and is not at all impressed with what he has seen of our insignificant continent. Finally he does stop talking. You can hear the flies hum in the unwonted silence. Then he steps into the corridor and gazes out of the window. 'So this all belonged to Russia once? Now, that must have been a pretty fair-sized country,' he exclaims.

A. A. MILNE1

BY ST. JOHN ADCOCK

It is still sometimes taken for granted by very fierce students of letters that there are more intimations of literary quality in a heavy foot than in a light heart. But most of us, as we grow up, put less trust in mere solemnity, do not expect the profoundest truths to come always with looks of profundity on their faces, and are prepared to find wisdom in a jest, a real knowledge of the facts of life deftly clothed in the airiest disguise of fiction, and realize that an easy grace and charm of style, so far from being a sign of any shallowness of thinking, may mean no more than that the writer has a happy gift or has acquired a gracious art of expression that gives his thought wings to fly to many doors it would never reach if he sent it plodding afoot with 1 From the Bookman (London literary monthly), December

nothing to help it on its way but the value of the load it carried.

I am not suggesting that such an author as A. A. Milne cunningly conveys all manner of fine teachings in everything he writes; that he never gives the rein to his fancy and takes a holiday run into lively irresponsibilities of humor. He did that frequently in his early days, when we knew him only as ‘A. A. M.' of Punch; but often there is a sound and genially satirical commentary on life and character in those whimsical sketches, and if you have seen or read his plays - The Truth about Blayds, The Lucky One, The Camberley Triangle, for instanceyou will know him for a realist who can, without losing his artistic lightness of touch, handle the darker problems of human experience with a bitter poignancy of feeling and a mordant irony.

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