do you dissemble? My mother is good-hearted, she will forgive. She will understand; but I’m dying--there’s no reason why I should lie; give me your hand.’... I sprang up and ran out of the room. The old mother, of course, guessed the true state of affairs. “I’ll not go on, however, tiring you with any further details. As it is, I find it painful to recall it all. The girl died the next day. May the Holy Kingdom be hers!” added the doctor quickly and with a sigh. “Before she died she requested her kin to go out of the room and to leave me alone with her. ‘Forgive me,’ she said to me. ‘I perhaps am guilty before you ... my illness ... but, believe me, I never loved any one so much ... don’t forget me ... take care of my ring.’” The doctor turned away his face; I took his hand. “Eh!” he sighed, “let’s chat about something else, or perhaps you’d rather have a game of ‘preference,’ for a trifle? It’s not for our kind to give way to elevated feelings. There’s but one thing left for us--to manage that our children don’t squall, and our wives don’t scold. Since those days, you see, I have entered, as one might say, into the legal bonds of matrimony.... Well.... I married a merchant’s daughter, who brought me a _dot_ of seven thousand rubles. Her name is Akulina; it goes just right with Trifon. She is an ill-tempered dame, but fortunately she sleeps all day long.... Did you say ‘preference’?” We began to play preference, at a copeck. Trifon Ivanich succeeded in winning from me two rubles and a half, and left late, much gratified with his victory. FOOTNOTES: [3] The change from _you_ to _thou_ is significant here, because among the Russians _thou_ is employed only in familiar or intimate sense. TOLSTOI, ARTIST AND PREACHER As a man of letters, Lyoff Nikolaievitch, Count Tolstoi, holds undisputed place in the first rank; as a philosophical preacher of reform, his position is much less secure. And it is sadly ironical that one who was so ready to lay aside those fictional laurels which all men yielded to him readily, has not been accorded the preëminence among moralists which he held to be of so much greater worth. The last twenty years of his abundant life disclosed in this greatest of all Russians that which was always really present--the single eye, with its gaze constantly set upon ethical ideals. Even a swift survey of his life and its so closely interpenetrating work will bear out this estimate--perhaps surprisingly.