The rooms allotted to us were parts of his large library. On a shelf I found the carefully kept catalogue of the fourteen cases, with each book on a separate slip. A glance through one of the glass doors showed me English, French, German, and Russian books; my eye even fell on a Danish grammar. There stood side by side a work on Leonardo da Vinci, Björnson's _Über unsere Kraft_, Marcel Prévost's _Vierges Fortes_, Jules Verne's _Journey to the Centre of the Earth_, Spinoza, Renan, a book of travel by Vámbéry, a book of entomology, Buffon--the most different sorts of books, and obviously much used. The count is able to accomplish such an achievement in reading only by a careful division of the day, not to say a military exactness and thoroughness, pushed perhaps to pedantry, in all his doings. Later, in speaking with me, he used the familiar phrase, "Genius is eternal patience." He has this patience. It is well known how he works--that he has his first conception copied on the type-writer, then corrected, then copied again, and so on until the work satisfies him. On the day of my visit this man of seventy-five took an early morning walk of an hour and a half, looked over his large mail, wrote an English article upon the war, rode two full hours in the afternoon with the thermometer at six, worked again, and remained in almost uninterrupted conversation with us from six o'clock until midnight. He spoke German most of the time, rarely French. At the end of the exceedingly intense conversation he was just as youthfully elastic as at the beginning; indeed, in the late night hours his eyes first began to glow with a light of inspiration which no one who has once seen it can ever forget. In addition to the great thoroughness of all his action and the strict division of the day, a vital energy which must be called truly phenomenal is also most essentially characteristic of his personality. Leo Tolstoï is a giant in psychical and intellectual strength, as he must once have been in physical strength also. It is not purely accidental that the two heroes in whom he has pictured himself most unmistakably--Peter, in _War and Peace_, and Levin, in _Anna Karenina_--are large, strong men of unusual productive capacity. XXIX A VISIT TO TOLSTOÏ--_CONTINUED_