ter, completely disillusioned both in regard to his great
contemporary and to the literary world of St. Petersburg, shook off the
dust of the capital, and, after resigning his commission in the army,
went abroad on a tour through Germany, Switzerland, and France.

In France his growing aversion from capital punishment became
intensified by his witnessing a public execution, and the painful
thoughts aroused by the scene of the guillotine haunted his sensitive
spirit for long. He left France for Switzerland, and there, among
beautiful natural surroundings, and in the society of friends, he
enjoyed a respite from mental strain.

"A fresh, sweet-scented flower seemed to have blossomed in my spirit; to
the weariness and indifference to all things which before possessed
me had succeeded, without apparent transition, a thirst for love, a
confident hope, an inexplicable joy to feel myself alive."

Those halcyon days ushered in the dawn of an intimate friendship between
himself and a lady who in the correspondence which ensued usually
styled herself his aunt, but was in fact a second cousin. This lady, the
Countess Alexandra A. Tolstoy, a Maid of Honour of the Bedchamber, moved
exclusively in Court circles. She was intelligent and sympathetic, but
strictly orthodox and mondaine, so that, while Tolstoy's view of
life gradually shifted from that of an aristocrat to that of a social
reformer, her own remained unaltered; with the result that at the end
of some forty years of frank and affectionate interchange of ideas,
they awoke to the painful consciousness that the last link of mutual
understanding had snapped and that their friendship was at an end.

But the letters remain as a valuable and interesting record of one
of Tolstoy's rare friendships with women, revealing in his unguarded
confidences fine shades of his many-sided nature, and throwing light on
the impression he made both on his intimates and on those to whom he was
only known as a writer, while his moral philosophy was yet in embryo.
They are now about to appear in book form under the auspices of M.
Stakhovich, to whose kindness in giving me free access to the originals
I am indebted for the extracts which follow. From one of the countess's
first letters we learn that the feelings of affection, hope, and
happiness which possessed Tolstoy in Switzerland irresistibly
communicated themselves to those about him.

"You are good in a very uncommon way," she writes, "and