; I know that I am
very fond of you, but I have quite forgotten who you are"; and when he
went up to the zala after one of these fainting fits, he looked round
with an astonished air and said, "Where's my brother Nitenka." Nitenka
had died fifty years before.

The day following all traces of the attack would disappear.

During one of these fainting fits my brother Sergei, in undressing my
father, found a little note-book on him. He put it in his own pocket,
and next day, when he came to see my father, he handed it back to him,
telling him that he had not read it.

"There would have been no harm in YOUR seeing it," said my father, as he
took it back.

This little diary in which he wrote down his most secret thoughts and
prayers was kept "for himself alone," and he never showed it to any one.
I saw it after my father's death. It is impossible to read it without
tears.

It is curious that the sudden decay of my father's memory displayed
itself only in the matter of real facts and people. He was entirely
unaffected in his literary work, and everything that he wrote down to
the last days of his life is marked by his characteristic logicalness
and force. It may be that the reason he forgot the details of real life
was because he was too deeply absorbed in his abstract work.

My wife was at Yasnaya Polyana in October, and when she came home she
told me that there was something wrong there. "Your mother is nervous
and hysterical; your father is in a silent and gloomy frame of mind."

I was very busy with my office work, but made up my mind to devote my
first free day to going and seeing my father and mother.

When I got to Yasnaya, my father had already left it.

I paid Aunt Masha a visit some little time after my father's funeral. We
sat together in her comfortable little cell, and she repeated to me once
more in detail the oft-repeated story of my father's last visit to her.

"He sat in that very arm-chair where you are sitting now, and how he
cried!" she said.

"When Sasha arrived with her girl friend, they set to work studying this
map of Russia and planning out a route to the Caucasus. Lyovotchka sat
there thoughtful and melancholy.

"'Never mind, Papa; it'll be all right,' said Sasha, trying to encourage
him.

"'Ah, you women, you women!' answered her father, bitterly. 'How can it
ever be all right?'

"I so much hoped that he would settle down here; it would just have
suited him. And it was his own idea,