the mother because her belief was not of the orthodox pattern. My opinion is that Tolstoi was mistaken, at least as to the father; and that the father had been led to give away his property and work with his hands in obedience to the ideas so eloquently advocated by Tolstoi himself. Unlike his master, this gentleman appears not to have had the advantage of a wife who mitigated his ideas. Tolstoi also referred to the difficulties which translators had found in securing publishers for his most recent book--"The Kingdom of God." On my assuring him that American publishers of high standing would certainly be glad to take it, he said that he had supposed the ideas in it so contrary to opinions dominant in America as to prevent its publication there. Returning to the subject of religion in Russia, he referred to some curious incongruities; as, for example, the portrait of Socrates forming part of a religious picture in the Annunciation Church at the Kremlin. He said that evidently some monk, who had dipped into Plato, had thus placed Socrates among the precursors of Christ. I cited the reason assigned by Melanchthon for Christ's descent into hell--namely, the desire of the Redeemer to make himself known to Socrates, Plato, and the best of the ancient philosophers; and I compared this with Luther's idea, so characteristic of him, that Christ descended into hell in order to have a hand-to-hand grapple and wrestle with Satan. This led Tolstoi to give me a Russian legend of the descent into hell, which was that, when Christ arrived there, he found Satan forging chains, but that, at the approach of the Saviour, the walls of hell collapsed, and Satan found himself entangled in his own chains, and remained so for a thousand years. In regard to the Jews, he said that he sympathized with them, but that the statements regarding the persecution of them were somewhat exaggerated. Kennan's statements regarding the treatment of prisoners in Siberia he thought overdrawn at times, but substantially true. He expressed his surprise that certain leading men in the empire, whom he named, could believe that persecution and the forcible repression of thought would have any permanent effect at the end of the nineteenth century.