[37] I am again all alone, and I confess that very often the solitude is painful to me, for the acquaintanceships one makes in hotels and on the railways are not a resource. But there is at least this much good in this loneliness--it prompts me to work. I am working a little, but it goes badly, as usual in summer. It was here that the incident occurred described in _Lucerne_, a sketch published in the September number of the _Contemporary_ that same year, and one which in its fierce castigation of the rich is a precursor of much that he wrote thirty years later. Especially the conduct of the wealthy English tourists roused his ire. The particular incident the story deals with is this: On 7 July 1857, in Lucerne, in front of the Schweizerhof Hotel, where the richest people stay, an itinerant mendicant-singer sang songs and played his guitar for half-an-hour. About a hundred people listened to him. Three times the singer asked them to give him something, but not one of them did so, and many laughed at him. This is not fiction, but a positive fact, which any one who cares may verify by asking the permanent inhabitants of the Schweizerhof, and by looking up the newspaper lists of foreign visitors at the Schweizerhof on 7 July. It is an event which the historians of our times should inscribe in indelible letters of fire. In the story, Prince Nehlúdof, indignant at such treatment of a man who was a real artist and whose songs all had enjoyed, brought the singer into the hotel and treated him to a bottle of wine. He goes on to ask himself: Which is more a man, and which more a barbarian: the lord who, on seeing the singer's worn-out clothes, angrily left the table, and for his service did not give him a millionth part of his property, and who now sits satiated, in a well-lit, comfortable room, calmly discussing the affairs of China and approving the murders that are being committed there--or the little singer who with a franc in his pocket, risking imprisonment, has tramped over hill and dale for twenty years, harming no one but cheering many by his songs, and whom they insulted to-day and all but turned out, leaving him--weary, hungry and humiliated--to make his bed somewhere on rotting straw? After passing a few weeks at Lucerne, Tolstoy returned to Russia _viâ_ Stuttgart, Berlin, and Stettin, from which port he took steamer to Petersburg, and after staying a week there to see Nekrásof and meet his colleagues of the _Contemporary_, he went through Moscow to Yásnaya, where he arrived in August. In his Diary we find this note: