Beneath the restless effervescence of fancy and youth the religious sentiment was pulsating,--the strongest and most deeply rooted sentiment in his soul. One episode from the "Memoirs" will prove to us the innate religious nature of the novelist. He tells us that once, when he was still a child in his father's country-house, a certain beggar came to the door, a poor vagabond, one-eyed and pock-marked, half idiot and foolish,--one of those coarse clay vessels in which, according to contemporaneous Russian literature, the divine light is wont to be enclosed. He was offered shelter and hospitality, though none knew whence he came, nor why he followed a mysterious wandering life, always going from place to place, barefooted and poor, visiting the convents, distributing religious objects, murmuring incoherent words, and sleeping wherever a handful of straw was thrown down for him. Within the house, at supper-time, they fall to discussing him. Tolstoï's mother pities him, his father abuses him; the latter thinks him little better than a cheat and a sluggard, the former reveres him as one inspired of God, a holy man, who earns glory and reward every minute by wearing around his body a chain sixty pounds in weight. Nevertheless, the vagabond obtains shelter and food, and the children, whose curiosity has been excited by the discussion, go and hide in a dark room next to his, so as "to see Gricha's chain." Tolstoï was filled with awe in his dark corner to hear the beggar pray, to see him throw himself upon the floor and writhe in mystic transports amid the clanking of his chain. "Many things have happened since then," he exclaims, "many other memories have lost all importance for me; Gricha, the wanderer, has long since reached the end of his last journey, but the impression which he produced upon me will never fade; I shall never forget the feelings that he awoke in my soul. O Gricha! O great Christian! Thy faith was so ardent that thou couldst feel God near; thy love was so great that the words flowed of themselves from thy lips, and thou hadst not to ask thy reason for an examination of them. And how magnificently didst thou praise the Almighty when, words failing to express the feelings of thy heart, thou threwest thyself weeping upon the floor!" This episode of childhood will indeed never fade from the memory or the heart of Tolstoï. After seeking conviction and repose in arrogant human science and in philosophy, Tolstoï, like his two heroes, finds them at last in the meekness and simplicity of the most abject classes. Like his own Pierre Besukof, who receives the mystic illumination at the mouth of a common soldier who is to be shot by the French, or like his own Levine, who gets the same from a poor laboring peasant stacking hay, Tolstoï was converted by one Sutayef, one of those innumerable _mujiks_ who go about the country announcing the good tidings of the day of communist fraternity. "Five