I found that to his disbelief in any right of ownership literary property formed no exception. He told me that, in his view, he had no right to receive money for the permission to print a book. To this I naturally answered that by carrying out this doctrine he would simply lavish large sums upon publishers in every country of Europe and America, many of them rich and some of them piratical; and that in my opinion he would do a much better thing by taking the full value of his copyrights and bestowing the proceeds upon the peasantry starving about him. To which he answered that it was a question of duty. To this I agreed, but remarked that beneath this lay the question what this duty really was. It was a pleasure to learn from another source that the countess took a different view of it, and that she had in some way secured the proceeds of his copyrights for their very large and interesting family. Light was thus thrown on Tolstoi's remark, made afterward, that women are not so self-sacrificing as men; that a man would sometimes sacrifice his family for an idea, but that a woman would not. He then went on to express an interest in the Shakers, and especially in Frederick Evans. He had evidently formed an idea of them very unlike the reality; in fact, the Shaker his imagination had developed was as different from a Lebanon Shaker as an eagle from a duck, and his notion of their influence on American society was comical. He spoke at some length regarding religion in Russia, evidently believing that its present dominant form is soon to pass away. I asked him how then he could account for the fact that while in other countries women are greatly in the majority at church services, in every Russian church the majority are men; and that during the thirty-five years since my last visit to Moscow this tendency had apparently increased. He answered, "All this is on the surface; there is much deeper thought below, and the great want of Russia is liberty to utter it." He then gave some examples to show this, among them the case of a gentleman and lady in St. Petersburg, whose children had been taken from them and given to Princess ----, their grandmother, because the latter is of the Orthodox Church and the former are not. I answered that I had seen the children; that their grandmother had told me that their mother was a screaming atheist with nihilistic tendencies, who had left her husband and was bringing up the children in a scandalous way,--teaching them to abjure God and curse the Czar; that their father had thought it his duty to give all his property away and work as a laborer; that therefore she--the grandmother--had secured an order from the Emperor empowering her to take charge of the children; that I had seen the children at their grandmother's house, and that they had seemed very happy. Tolstoi insisted that this statement by the grandmother was simply made to cover the fact that the children were taken from