and of his own age, dirtying and spoiling things, breaking and spilling things, and throwing food to the dogs which seemed to the boy delicacies, expecting other people to wait on them and never doing any work themselves. Tolstoy understood then, he says, how absurd it was to take poor people into your house and educate them, when you were yourselves leading such idle, useless lives.
Tolstoy says his one desire was to hide their life from the boy; everything that he told him or tried to teach him he felt was destroyed by the example they were all setting him.
So Tolstoy tried hard to live according to his ideals, and became something like a monk but without a monk's narrow views and superstitious beliefs. He dropped his title quite naturally, and when a peasant called him "Your Excellency," Tolstoy replied, "I am called simply Leo Nikolayevitch," and went on to speak of the matter in hand. Manual labor, which had always been a pleasure to him, now became a sort of religion. Every day he worked for hours at hay-*making, plowing, reaping or wood-cutting as the case might be. Nothing absorbed him like mowing, and he would stand among the peasants in his smock listening with perfect happiness to the sound of scythes. Country life, labor, healthy appetite and sound sleep was his idea of a happy life.
In the winter evenings Tolstoy learned to make boots. He engaged a black-bearded shoemaker to come
