112 THROUGH RUSSIA ON A MUSTANG. 



a census. Tolstoi's eldest son was then a student in 

 Moscow, and the father accompanied the son in going 

 his rounds to number the people. 



The task took them into some of the Moscow slums. 

 The scenes of squalid poverty and wretchedness that 

 the Count was then brought in contact with was the 

 turning point in his career. For fifty years he had 

 lived a life of selfish ease and pleasure. He had been 

 through the whole mill of gay, fashionable existence. 

 As a youth, he had been dissipated ; as a man, well-to- 

 do and successful. The world had been to him a 

 pleasure-ground, and the future a subject of philosoph- 

 ical speculation. 



He went home a changed man. It seemed as if all 

 his life had been utterly wasted. The selfishness of a 

 life that had been largely devoted to pleasure and self- 

 seeking now seemed to him an enormity of error and 

 wrong. How should he expiate the great crime of 

 fifty years of wrong-doing? 



He sought consolation in the existing forms of 

 religion. He said he found them worse than honest 

 atheism. He turned to the Scriptures and independ- 

 ent research and harkened to the teachings of SutaiefT, 

 a free-thinking peasant of Novgorod, who had been 

 persecuted by the priests for independent action in the 

 matter of baptizing his children. He drew inspiration 

 from the child-like simplicity of the peasantry on his 

 estate. He brought to bear on his observations and 

 researches the mind of a cultured man and the intellect 

 of a genius. The result has been the teachings that 

 the world now recognizes as the Tolstoian creed. 



After he had become convinced that salvation lay in 



