Stopping suddenly, and turning his face full upon me, he asked "What is your belief respecting Jesus?" I answered that I regard the Rabbi of Nazareth as one of the greatest of Israel's teachers and leaders and reformers, not as a divine being who lived and taught humanly but as a human being who lived and taught divinely. "Such is my belief," said he, and he continued "Your belief, however, is not that of the Jews in Russia. Many of them have little knowledge of Jesus, and more of them, I fear, have little love for him. And who can blame them?" he continued, "they have been made to suffer so much in his name that it would be little short of a miracle if they loved him. Mohamed was more honest, he gave to people the choice between the Koran and the sword. Christians profess love, and practice hatred." I told the count that through the mediation of Mr. White, the Procurator had consented to grant me an audience, but not till after the lapse of seven weeks, after his return from some monastery to which he had retired for prayer, penance and meditation. "Well may he meditate," said the count, "on the wrongs he has committed, and even were he to do penance seven times seven weeks or seven times seven months or seven years, he could not blot out the guilt that stains his soul, and that has darkened and cursed the lives of tens of thousands of innocent human beings." Tells why he escaped Siberia. Amazed at the freedom with which he exposed his condemnation of the most powerful officials of the realm, and convinced that as he spoke to me he must have spoken often to others, and that the government could not possibly be ignorant of it, I asked how it was that he had escaped seizure, exile or imprisonment, to which he replied: "I am not yet sure that I shall not end my days in Siberia. That I have escaped thus far is due to the government's sensitiveness of the world's opinion. It knows of the hold my publications have gained for me on civilized people. It fears the cry of outrage that would be raised at the banishment or imprisonment of a man as old as I." He was at that time sixty-six years old. I have since read, that when the Czar was one day approached by one of the grand dukes with a request for the banishment of Tolstoy on the ground that he incited rebellion against the government and the church, the Czar is said to have replied, "_Je ne veux pas ajouter a sa gloire une couronne d' un martyr_"--_I do not wish to add to his glory the martyr's crown_--words used by Louis XIV of France, when a similar request was made of him. Under the Poverty Tree.