for her memory, in his words, that we all
looked on her as a sort of saint.

My father remembered his father well, because he was already nine years
old when he died. He loved him, too, and always spoke of him reverently;
but one always felt that his mother's memory, although he had never
known her, was dearer to him, and his love for her far greater than for
his father.

Even to this day I do not exactly know the story of the sale of the old
house. My father never liked talking about it, and for that reason I
could never make up my mind to ask him the details of the transaction. I
only know that the house was sold for five thousand paper rubles [3] by
one of his relatives, who had charge of his affairs by power of attorney
when he was in the Caucasus.

It was said to have been done in order to pay off my father's gambling
debts. That was quite true.

My father himself told me that at one time he was a great card-player,
that he lost large sums of money, and that his financial affairs were
considerably embarrassed.

The only thing about which I am in doubt is whether it was with my
father's knowledge or by his directions that the house was sold, or
whether the relative in question did not exceed his instructions and
decide on the sale of his own initiative.

My father cherished his parents' memory to such an extent, and had such
a warm affection for everything relating to his own childhood, that it
is hard to believe that he would have raised his hand against the house
in which he had been born and brought up and in which his mother had
spent her whole life.

Knowing my father as I do, I think it is highly possible that he wrote
to his relative from the Caucasus, "Sell something," not in the least
expecting that he would sell the house, and that he afterward took the
blame for it on himself. Is that not the reason why he was always so
unwilling to talk about it?

In 1871, when I was five years old, the zala [4] and study were built on
the house.

The walls of the zala were hung with old portraits of ancestors. They
were rather alarming, and I was afraid of them at first; but we got
used to them after a time, and I grew fond of one of them, of my
great-grandfather, Ilya Andreyevitch Tolstoy, because I was told that I
was like him.

Beside him hung the portrait of another great-grandfather, Prince
Nikolai Sergeyevitch Volkonsky, my grandmother's father, with thick,
black eyebrows, a gray wig, and a red kafta