ing from the
pretentious dwelling to the humble shelter of logs.

For fifteen versts (ten miles) after we had left all these behind us, we
drove through a lovely rolling country, on a fine macadamized highway
leading to the south and to Kieff. The views were wide, fresh, and fair.
Hayfields, plowed fields, fields of green oats, yellowing rye,
blue-flowered flax, with birch and leaf trees in small groves near at
hand, and forests in the distance, varied the scene. Evergreens were
rarer here, and oak-trees more plentiful, than north of Moscow. The
grass by the roadside was sown thickly with wild flowers: Canterbury
bells, campanulas, yarrow pink and white, willow-weed (good to
adulterate tea), yellow daisies, spiraea, pinks, corn-flowers, melilot,
honey-sweet galium, yellow everlasting, huge deep-crimson crane's-bill,
and hosts of others.

Throughout this sweet drive my merry _izvostchik_ delighted me with his
discourse. It began thus. I asked, "Did he know Count Tolstoy?"

"Did he know Count Tolstoy? Everybody knew him. He was the first
gentleman in the empire [!]. There was not another such man in all the
land."

"Could he read? Had he read the count's 'Tales'?"

"Yes. He had read every one of the count's books that he could lay his
hands on. Did I mean the little books with the colored covers and the
pictures on the outside?" (He alluded to the little peasant "Tales" in
their original cheap form, costing two or three cents apiece.)
"Unfortunately they were forbidden, or not to be had at the Tula shops,
and though there were libraries which had them, they were not for such
as he."*

* At this time, in Moscow, the sidewalk bookstalls, such as this man
would have been likely to patronize, could not furnish a full set of the
_Tales_ in the cheap form. The venders said that they were "forbidden;"
but since they openly displayed and sold such as they had, and since any
number of complete sets could be obtained at the publishers' hard by,
the prohibition evidently extended only to the issue of a fresh edition.
Meanwhile, the _Tales_ complete in one volume were not forbidden. This
volume, one of the set of the author's works published by his wife, cost
fifty kopeks (about twenty-five cents), not materially more than the
other sort. As there was a profit to the family on this edition, and
none on the cheap edition, the withdrawal of the latter may have been
merely a private business arrangement, to be expected under the