104 THROUGH RUSSIA ON A MUSTANG. 



and whom I questioned about his master's habits, told 

 me that the moujiks often imposed on his benevolence 

 and shamefully abused his charity. From all the 

 country round the peasants came to Tolstoi' with their 

 woes and grievances, much as the freed negroes of the 

 South used to appeal to the St. Clairs among the for- 

 mer slave owners, after the war. A short time before 

 our visit a moujik come to Tolstoi with a very long face 

 and asserted that his horse had died and that he was 

 unable to cultivate his land. The Count gave him a 

 horse out of his own stables to plow his ground and 

 get in his crops. The moujik, who was a worthless 

 fellow, took the horse away, sold it, and spent the 

 money on vodka. Only recently, too, the overseer of 

 the estate had caught a moujik in the act of cutting 

 down and carting off trees from the Count's forest. 

 He brought the thief to Tolstoi and proposed to take 

 him before the court. " Let him go, poor fellow," said 

 the author of ' Christ's Christianity.' '"The trees are 

 as much his as mine. I neither planted them nor cut 

 them down." 



Neither the timber thief nor the man who swindled 

 him out of the horse was punished. The wonder is 

 that Yasnia Polyana does not become a nest of worth- 

 less vagabonds and that the Tolstoi' estate is not 

 stripped as bare as a desert. The latter possibility would 

 disturb the Count's equanimity little. He would, in 

 fact, utter no word of protest at the spoliation of his 

 property, and only the stand taken by the Countess 

 and the children prevents the family possessions from 

 melting entirely away. 



The estate consists of iooo dessiatines, or 2500 



