g on
the blackboard. "Us," he said to some one when the boy was gone. Which
of us would have expressed himself like that? You see, he did not say
to "get" or to "break off," but to "bite off," which was right, because
they did literally "bite" off the chalk from the lump with their teeth,
and not break it off.]

[Footnote 3: About $3000.]

[Footnote 4: The zala is the chief room of a house, corresponding to
the English drawing-room, but on a grand scale. The gostinaya--literally
guest-room, usually translated as drawing-room--is a place for more
intimate receptions. At Yasnaya Polyana meals were taken in the zala,
but this is not the general Russian custom, houses being provided also
with a stolovaya, or dining-room.]

[Footnote 5: Kaftan, a long coat of various cuts, including military
and naval frock-coat, and the long gown worn by coachmen.]

[Footnote 6: Afanasyi Shenshin, the poet, who adopted his mother's
name, Fet, for a time, owing to official difficulties about his
birth-certificate. An intimate friend of Tolstoy's.]

[Footnote 7: "Sovremennik," or "Contemporary Review," edited by the poet
Mekrasof, was the rallying-place for the "men of the forties," the new
school of realists. Ostrovsky is the dramatist; Gontcharof the novelist,
author of "Oblomof"; Grigorovitch wrote tales about peasant life, and
was the discoverer of Tchekhof's talent as a serious writer.]

[Footnote 8: The balks are the banks dividing the fields of different
owners or crops. Hedges are not used for this purpose in Russia.]

[Footnote 9: Pazanki, tracks of a hare, name given to the last joint of
the hind legs.]

[Footnote 10: A Moscow monthly, founded by Katkof, who somehow managed
to edit both this and the daily "Moskovskiya Vyedomosti," on which
"Uncle Kostya" worked at the same time.]

[Footnote 11: Dmitry. My father's brother Dmitry died in 1856; Nikolai
died September 20, 1860.]

[Footnote 12: That is to say, his eyes went always on the straightest
road to attain satisfaction for himself.]

[Footnote 13: Khamsvniki, a street in Moscow.]

[Footnote 14: Maria Mikhailovna, his wife.]

[Footnote 15: Tolstoy's sister. She became a nun after her husband's
death and the marriage of her three daughters.]

[Footnote 16: Tolstoy was in the artillery, and commanded a battery in
the Crimea.]

[Footnote 17: Fet, at whose house the quarrel took place, tells all
about it in his memoirs. Tolstoy dogmatized about lady-like charity,