e to Mikhail
Alexandrovitch, and I've fallen in love with him in my old age, like a
wicked woman!"

On the fifth of February, her name-day, Agafya Mikhailovna received a
telegram of congratulation from Stakhovitch.

When my father heard of it, he said jokingly to Agafya Mikhailovna:

"Aren't you ashamed that a man had to trudge two miles through the frost
at night all for the sake of your telegram?"

"Trudge, trudge? Angels bore him on their wings. Trudge, indeed! You
get three telegrams from an outlandish Jew woman," she growled, "and
telegrams every day about your Golokhvotika. Never a trudge then; but I
get name-day greetings, and it's trudge!"

And one could not but acknowledge that she was right. This telegram,
the only one in the whole year that was addressed to the kennels, by
the pleasure it gave Agafya Mikhailovna was far more important of course
than this news or the about a ball given in Moscow in honor of a Jewish
banker's daughter, or about Olga Andreyevna Golokvastovy's arrival at
Yasnaya.

Agafya Mikhailovna died at the beginning of the nineties. There were no
more hounds or sporting dogs at Yasnaya then, but till the end of her
days she gave shelter to a motley collection of mongrels, and tended and
fed them.

THE HOME OF THE TOLSTOYS

I CAN remember the house at Yasnaya Polyana in the condition it was in
the first years after my father's marriage.

It was one of the two-storied wings of the old mansion-house of the
Princes Volkonsky, which my father had sold for pulling down when he was
still a bachelor.

From what my father has told me, I know that the house in which he was
born and spent his youth was a three-storied building with thirty-six
rooms. On the spot where it stood, between the two wings, the remains
of the old stone foundation are still visible in the form of trenches
filled with rubble, and the site is covered with big sixty-year-old
trees that my father himself planted.

When any one asked my father where he was born, he used to point to a
tall larch which grew on the site of the old foundations.

"Up there where the top of that larch waves," he used to say; "that's
where my mother's room was, where I was born on a leather sofa."

My father seldom spoke of his mother, but when he did, it was delightful
to hear him, because the mention of her awoke an unusual strain of
gentleness and tenderness in him. There was such a ring of respectful
affection, so much reverence