We entered a hut, and a low chorus of welcome greeted us. We were in the presence of that Russia for whose sake Tolstoy had abandoned rank and wealth. A heavy-faced, hairy man -- a deaf mute, who had once been a serf -- sat at a table eating black bread. Two half-naked, rosy children sprawled playfully beside his plate. The black eyes of the peasant glistened with pleasure, and the lines in his face softened when he saw Tolstoy's daughter. His wife and daughter were weaving clothes for themselves. They stood up and curtsied.

Medicine for the baby. The little one swallowed it greedily. The pet lamb was brought out to bleat at the Countess's feet and lick her white hand. The sick sheep were in the bedroom.

We sat down in the dim hut and listened to the family joys and woes. The sheep were not breeding well, and the outlook was hard. Would the Countess come and look at the horse they had bought for thirty-five roubles, and give her opinion? We went into the stockade behind the hut, and the Countess examined the horse's teeth and feet. Ideas were exchanged, and advice given.

Then we trudged through the bitter storm to the big school hut. It was crowded with tousle-headed boys and girls chanting the Russian alphabet in every key, while a swarthy young man, plainly embarrassed by our presence, tried to awe the giggling scholars into silence by haughtily "eyeing them over." The little Countess had once been their teacher, and no one could frighten them in her presence; and she went from one to the other, examining their attempts at writing, patting their heads and commending good work. This school was supported by Count Tolstoy, and his two daughters were the teachers until the Russian authorities refused to permit it any longer, lest the Countesses might put liberal ideas into the children's minds.

As we walked back through the desolate street, we were invited into another hut. A blind, white-haired woman and her two fat but pretty daughters sat at their spinning wheels, in the rude glory of embroidered peasant costumes. A letter from a relative had arrived. Would the Countess read it to them? Of course she would. The fair young girl, with the snow still sparkling on her skirt and boots, seated herself in the midst of them, and began to read the coarse scrawlings, nodding now at one and now at another, as references were made to different members of the family.

It was all so simple, so genuine. She sat there like a peasant among peasants, sharing the sorrows and perplexities and humors of their lives.

I had seen the Russia of Tolstoy.

And when we went back to the house, the Count took me with him for a long walk. The storm had died away, and the snowflakes drifted lightly through the air. A distant tinkle of sleighbells sounded over the frozen stretches.

When Tolstoy goes out for his daily walk he dresses like any simple peasant, and I could hardly realize that the rough Colossus striding along so swiftly beside me in the deep snow was the high priest of Russian letters.

"You newspaper writers are an irreverent tribe," he said.

"You have a Colonel Ingersoll in America," he said, as we descended through a little copse of birch trees, "a loose talker who has said some foolish words. He argues that Christ's Sermon on the Mount is not practical when applied to our present industrialism. I am strongly tempted to write a book on this man's shallow teachings. He is an ignoramus. He talks as if industrialism were a law instead of a product of human activity which can be changed. The truth is, that the whole system of compulsion is wrong. Every enemy of human liberty relies upon it. No man should be compelled to do anything against his will. In my new work I intend to quote Thomas Jefferson's declaration that the least government is the best government. He might have gone a step forward, and said that no government at all is better still."

"That suggests socialism."

"I know it does."

"You will find Thomas Jefferson a poor witness for a socialistic argument."

"And you don't believe in socialism?" asked the Count.

"No. The American idea is to throw as much responsibility as possible on the individual and so develop individual character instead of merging individuality into the mass of society. Americans as a whole believe that when you try to level man you level downward, not upward. But Americans also hold that society must wield certain enumerated powers of government, in order to restrain the ruthless and the lawless."

"Lawless? Why should there be any laws?"

"Because without them contracts could not be enforced nor individual rights guarded."

"And why should contracts be enforced? When a man does not wish to do a thing, why should he be forced to do it?"

"Otherwise great human enterprises could not be prosecuted," I answered.

"But why should these great enterprises be carried on by force?"

"Because -- even looking at things from your own standpoint -- railways, and bridges, and ships, and telegraphs, bring men closer together, and hasten the day when the whole world will be simply one big family."

The Count strode through the snow in silence.

"There is something in that. Anything that brings us men's thoughts is good."

"Without the printing press I could not have known your teachings in New York, six thousand miles away."

"Did you ever hear of the Irish soldier who insisted that the only man in the regiment who was in step was himself?" I said.

The tall Count was wading through a dangerous part of the road. He stopped and raised his hand.

"That is not my idea at all," he said. "What I object to is the way in which men argue to themselves to prove that their selfish and immoral lives are based upon the teachings of Christ. The Master is not to be understood by any particular passage of His teachings. It is the spirit of His utterances as a whole that condemns our civilization. Christ would be an outcast among the Christians of the nineteenth century."

As we pressed forward into the high road, a splendid sleigh dashed past us, and a distinguished-looking man clad in rich sables, a jewelled broach flashing in his scarf, lifted his fur cap and greeted Tolstoy with a marked air of deference.

"God bless you, brother," said the Count, simply.

Presently two trembling old men, in weather-stained sheepskin coats, and dirty felt boots, came creeping along the road, arm in arm. They were pilgrims on their way to the shrines of holy Moscow, weary and wretched. They stopped a few feet before us and, crossing themselves, uncovered and saluted the Count as a brother peasant.

"God bless you, brothers," said Tolstoy, baring his head. Then he took them by the hand, and led them back to the house, while I followed slowly, contrasting in my mind the great men I had met in the capitals of the world with this mighty spirit that could reach out and lift sorrowful, discouraged humanity -- contrasting the Christianity of this barren, storm-swept Russian highway with the boulevards of Paris, with Piccadilly and with Broadway.

My wanderings have brought me to many scenes on the world's great highway, but I have never looked upon a more profoundly beautiful sight than that homeward walk.

We sat down to a rude dinner of vegetables spread over a long table resting on unpainted wooden trestles. It was a large room, bare of pictures or carpets. A piano was the only suggestion of luxury. The hungry pilgrims sat between Tolstoy's daughters. A slice of meat was placed before me. The Count referred to it as "that corpse," and I pushed it away.

"And so you don't eat meat?"

"No," said the Count; "there is no reason why we should kill innocent animals when we can live just as well on vegetables. It is needless cruelty."

"But you chop down trees," I suggested. "A tree has life. It breathes through its leaves, drinks through its roots, has sap-blood flowing in its veins and a bark skin. We know by the ivy and the sensitive plant that vegetables can even think. How do you know that you do not inflict the most terrible pain when you cleave a tree with your axe?"

The Count sighed and turned his great face away.

When the dinner was cleared away and the lamps were lit in the room where many a pilgrim has eaten and praised God, we gathered at a round table, where Tolstoy's wife and daughters knitted warm wraps for the peasants, and his three-year-old son danced a Russian dance when his father grimly refused to play "Puss in the corner." On one side of the table was the Countess Tolstoy, stately and beautiful, and on the other side sat the Count, his powerful features standing out in the dim light like bronze. Outside, the storm lashed the tops of the trees, and drifted the snow against the huts of the peasants. A broken-legged dog whined on the staircase.

It was then that I heard from the Countess of her plan for an audience with Alexander III. She hoped to soften the rigor of the brutal censorship that had turned her husband away from his art. I have since learned that her appeal to the Emperor was in vain. She begged him to relax the severity of the censors who had suppressed all that was splendid or vital in her husband's writings, in their blind effort to crush out liberalism. The Countess reminded her sovereign that Catherine the Great had made her reign glorious in history by drawing around her the great writers of her time, instead of alienating them from the court. Alexander listened patiently to the eloquent woman who had come from dreary Yasnia Poliana, strong in the righteousness of her cause, and believing that her entreaty would meet with a broad and generous response. She forgot that the spirit of progress was buried in the grave of Alexander II., and that the ascendency of Pobiedonostseff, the narrow-souled procurator-general of the Holy Synod, over the mind of his successor had destroyed all hope of reform. The Emperor heard her arguments as he heard the honest voice of Loris Melikoff pleading for a constitutional government, and he set his face against toleration. It is not too much to say that the failure of Tolstoy to write the last great novel which he planned was due to the inflexible opposition of the Czar.

Those who blame Tolstoy for his too literal Christianity, should see his surroundings, and then they may comprehend the stages by which he arrived at his present point of view. He is honest and sane. Even in the harshest periods of his austere life he has seemed to be happy. No one familiar with the facts can doubt that, however erratic his course has been, he has aroused in the thinking people of Russia a partial sense of the social, industrial, and political iniquities against which his peasant life has been a standing protest. I have told the story of his union with and separation from the Greek church, but I have not told all. There are other details which do not belong to the public, but which would help to explain the life of this extraordinary man.

While we talked together that night Tolstoy told me that he could never give up his idea that physical labor was a duty imposed upon every man, and that he would continue until his dying day to plough in the field, and to make shoes, no matter what society might say. He illustrated his labor creed by quoting the words of Timothy Michailovitch Bondareff, the Russian peasant whose interdicted book was made known to the world by the Count: --

"You may give all the treasures in the world to purchase a child, but it will not then be your own. It never has been yours and never can be. It belongs only to its own mother. It is the same with the question of food. A man may neglect the duty of laboring for bread; he may buy a loaf with money. But that loaf still belongs to the person whose labor earned it. For, even as a woman cannot purchase motherhood with money, nor in any other way, so a man ought, by the work of his own hands, to procure the necessary food for his own subsistence and that of his wife and children. He cannot elude the obligation by any means, whatever may be his rank or merit."

Through the mist of years that has gathered since I went to Yasnia Poliana I can look back and see Tolstoy reading Bondareff's will as though it were his own: --

"I will order my son not to bury me in the cemetery, but in the ground, which, cultivated by my arms, has furnished our daily bread. I will pray him not to fill my grave with clay or sand, but with fertile earth, and to leave no mound or anything to indicate the place of my burial. I will direct him to continue every year to sow the place with good wheat. Later this land may belong to some other cultivator, and in this manner they will gather the bread of life from my grave to the end of the world. Men will speak of my obsequies from century to century, and many laborers will follow my example. Perhaps some among you, O ye nobles and rich men, will also be interred in the earth where men sow their grain!"

The country round about Yasnia Poliana is hard and desolate. There is little to remind the peasants of the outside world except the visitations of the Imperial Government in search of recruits for the army. They live on from generation to generation, sequestered from the feverish influences of modern civilization. Few of them understand Tolstoy. They know that he is a great author, and they have heard that the Emperor ordered him to live in the country because he was a zealous champion of the common people and reviled the aristocracy. But I cannot believe that they suspect the tenderness and pity with which he regards them. And yet the pilgrims who are fed at his table and sheltered beneath his roof carry to all parts of the empire tales of Tolstoy's goodness, and the village shoemaker, who has worked side by side with him, declares that, although the Count makes poor shoes, he has made the young men proud to be laborers.

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