He had many children, managed his estates, taught the peasants, and wrote books, and though he was not living in the same house in which he was born, for the large wooden house had been removed and sold to pay his father's debts, he lived on the same spot in the stone one erected in its place. His wife helped in everything, in spite of her large family, for they had thirteen children. She found time to copy out all her husband's manuscripts, which to most people would have been as impossible a task as looking for a needle in a haystack, they were so extraordinarily badly written, and scratched out and rewritten. His first great novel, "War and Peace," one of the longest novels in existence, is said to have been copied out by Countess Tolstoy seven times.
Tolstoy always lived with his children, and did not banish them to nurseries and schoolrooms, as some people do. Up to the age of ten they were taught by their father and mother; their mother taught them Russian and music, and their father arithmetic and French. Most entertaining French it was, which consisted of reading amusing stories out of illustrated volumes of Jules Verne. If there happened to be a volume without pictures, Tolstoy made the pictures himself. He drew very badly, yet his pictures were so amusing that the children liked them much better than the ordinary ones.
He would discuss and explain interesting things with his children, and they were always eager to be
