To-day after lunch L. N. went on horseback to Sokolniki and came back late in the evening. Nevertheless, when Mme. M. A. Maklakov and myself began to say good-bye, he said he would come with us. On the way Mme. Maklakov kept saying all the time how much she would like to live in the country. L. N. interrupted her: “How it annoys me when people abuse the town with such exaggeration and say: To the country, to the country! All depends on the person,--in town, too, one can be with Nature. Don’t you remember,” L. N. asked her, “we had an old gatekeeper, Vasili? He lived all his life in town; in the summer he used to get up at 3 o’clock in the morning, and enjoyed his intercourse with Nature in our garden much more than country gentlemen do, who spend their evenings in the country playing cards. Besides, compared with the enormously important question of how to live one’s life in the best and most moral way, the question of town or country has no value at all.” Before this L. N. said with a smile: “I once said, but you must not talk about it, and I tell it you in secret: woman is generally so bad that the difference between a good and a bad woman scarcely exists.” _Yasnaya Polyana, July 31st._ I am working with N. N. Ge on the proofs of _Resurrection_. The corrections are to be inserted in the proof-sheets from L. N.’s draft copy, and two copies of the same are made. The draft copy remains here, and the fair copies are sent, one to Marx for the weekly _Niva_, and the other to Chertkov in England for the English edition. It is an interesting, but worrying and difficult work. Throughout, instead of the one printed proof-sheet, one has to copy out afresh three or four long pages. Often L. N.’s corrections are written so closely that a magnifying glass has to be used to read them. Unless one has seen L. N.’s incredible work, the numerous passages that are rewritten, the additions and alterations, the same incident being sometimes written dozens of times over, one can have not the remotest idea of this labour. _August 2nd._ I have been here from July 27th (in Yasnaya Polyana). A queer young man, K., came to L. N., and, on my asking him what he was doing, he said that “he was the free son of air.” K. told L. N. that he wanted to settle down in the country among the people. L. N. in recounting it said: “Of course, I did not advise him to do it. Usually nothing comes from such attempts. For instance, some very nice people, the N. N.’s, bought a small plot of land and settled like that in the country. A peasant cut down one of their trees; they did not want to take action in the court against him, and soon, when the peasants learnt about it, they cut down the whole woods. The peasant boys stole their peas; they were not beaten nor driven away, and then nearly the whole village came and stole all the peas, etc., etc.