es, who would catch them in the air. Then papa would teach us how
to strap the hare on the back of the saddle.

After the run we would all be in better spirits, and get to better
places near Yasenki and Retinka. Gray hares would get up oftener. Each
of us would have his spoils in the saddle-straps now, and we would begin
to hope for a fox.

Not many foxes would turn up. If they did, it was generally Tumashka,
who was old and staid, who distinguished himself. He was sick of hares,
and made no great effort to run after them; but with a fox he would
gallop at full speed, and it was almost always he who killed.

It would be late, often dark, when we got back home.

"ANNA KARENINA"

I REMEMBER my father writing his alphabet and reading-book in 1871 and
1872, but I cannot at all remember his beginning "Anna Karenina." I
probably knew nothing about it at the time. What did it matter to a boy
of seven what his father was writing? It was only later, when one kept
hearing the name again and again, and bundles of proofs kept arriving,
and were sent off almost every day, that I understood that "Anna
Karenina" was the name of the novel on which my father and mother were
both at work.

My mother's work seemed much harder than my father's, because we
actually saw her at it, and she worked much longer hours than he
did. She used to sit in the sitting-room off the zala, at her little
writing-table, and spend all her free time writing.

Leaning over the manuscript and trying to decipher my father's scrawl
with her short-sighted eyes, she used to spend whole evenings over it,
and often sat up late at night after everybody else had gone to bed.
Sometimes, when anything was written quite illegibly, she would go to
my father's study and ask him what it meant. But this was very rare,
because my mother did not like to disturb him.

When it happened, my father used to take the manuscript in his hand, and
ask with some annoyance, "What on earth is the difficulty?" and would
begin to read it out aloud. When he came to the difficult place he would
mumble and hesitate, and sometimes had the greatest difficulty in making
out, or, rather, in guessing, what he had written. He had a very bad
handwriting, and a terrible habit of writing in whole sentences between
the lines, or in the corners of the page, or sometimes right across it.

My mother often discovered gross grammatical errors, and pointed them
out to my father, and corrected th