Our resources came from landed property, and he, who had never concerned himself with rural questions, had to make himself acquainted with them. In this he was greatly helped by a neighbour, Count Bobrinsky, through whose influence he came to abandon the purely theoretical opinions he had hitherto held concerning agrarian questions. He had considered communal property as a desirable agrarian system: Count Bobrinsky showed him that it was not so, at any rate in Little Russia. Metchnikoff came to the country with the keenest desire to make himself useful. First of all he devoted the gratuity which he had received on leaving the University, to a school which my sister and myself desired to open in our family property. But we were met by administrative opposition which nearly wrecked our plan, under the pretext that it was intended for political propaganda. And though cordial relations were established from the first between Metchnikoff and the peasantry, many complications were unavoidable, due to the general agrarian situation, to the insufficiency of the peasants' allotments, and to their primitive methods of cultivation. My father, whose property was in the province of Kieff, had inherited another domain in that of Kherson; Metchnikoff therefore had to manage both estates and to adapt himself to their very different respective circumstances. The majority of the farmers in Little Russia at that time were Jews and were beginning to be persecuted both by the Government and by the peasants; Elie was constantly obliged to intervene. In the province of Kherson, it was a tradition with the peasants that the land should belong to them, and they imagined that this could be brought about by the simple elimination of the farmers. Therefore they inflicted constant vexations upon the latter, allowing cattle to pasture in their crops, pulling up their beetroots, etc. Metchnikoff attempted in vain to re-establish peace by means of compromise; he persuaded a farmer to sub-let part of the land to the peasants, but this had to be given up, for the latter did not carry out their engagements. Relations between the farmers and the peasants were getting worse and worse, and Metchnikoff, foreseeing a catastrophe, warned the local administration that the situation was getting very grave and would lead to irreparable consequences. He was merely told that preventive measures would be useless; hereupon the peasants brutally murdered a keeper who was turning the cattle away from the crops. Then at last the administration awoke, arrested the murderers, and twelve men were exiled to Siberia.