body
out from the house with his own hands, and himself bore it to the
churchyard.

When he got back to Yasnaya he spoke with touching affection of his
parting with this "inscrutable and beloved" brother, who was so strange
and remote from him, but at the same time so near and so akin.

FET, STRAKHOF, GAY

"WHAT'S this saber doing here?" asked a young guardsman, Lieutenant
Afanasyi Afanasyevitch Fet, of the footman one day as he entered the
hall of Ivan Sergeyevitch Turgenieff's flat in St. Petersburg in the
middle of the fifties.

"It is Count Tolstoy's saber; he is asleep in the drawing-room. And Ivan
Sergeyevitch is in his study having breakfast," replied Zalchar.

"During the hour I spent with Turgenieff," says Fet, in his
reminiscences, "we talked in low voices, for fear of waking the count,
who was asleep on the other side of the door."

"He's like that all the time," said Turgenieff, smiling; "ever since he
got back from his battery at Sebastopol, [16] and came to stay here, he
has been going the pace. Orgies, Gipsies, and gambling all night long,
and then sleeps like a dead man till two o'clock in the afternoon. I did
my best to stop him, but have given it up as a bad job.

"It was in this visit to St. Petersburg that I and Tolstoy became
acquainted, but the acquaintance was of a purely formal character, as I
had not yet seen a line of his writings, and had never heard of his
name in literature, except that Turgenieff mentioned his 'Stories of
Childhood.'"

Soon after this my father came to know Fet intimately, and they struck
up a firm and lasting friendship, and established a correspondence which
lasted almost till Fet's death.

It was only during the last years of Fet's life, when my father was
entirely absorbed in his new ideas, which were so at variance with
Afanasyi Afanasyevitch's whole philosophy of life, that they became
estranged and met more rarely.

It was at Fet's, at Stepanovka, that my father and Turgenieff quarreled.

Before the railway was made, when people still had to drive, Fet, on
his way into Moscow, always used to turn in at Yasnaya Polyana to see my
father, and these visits became an established custom. Afterward,
when the railway was made and my father was already married, Afanasyi
Afanasyevitch still never passed our house without coming in, and if he
did, my father used to write him a letter of earnest reproaches, and
he used to apologize as if he had been guilty of