When the Emancipation came, the peasants received freedom, and an allotment of land, subject to a special land-tax for sixty years; while their masters retained the rest of the land and received State Bonds for the capitalised value of the peasants' land-tax. An expedient resorted to by many a proprietor was, to allot land to the peasants in such a way that the latter were left without any pasture, and (being surrounded by the owner's estate) found themselves obliged to hire pasture land of him on his own terms. There were, till the Emancipation, two ways of holding serfs: (1) the primitive way of obliging them to work so many days a week for their master, before they could, on the other days, provide for their own wants; and (2) another way, which left the serf free to work for himself, provided that he paid _obrók_, _i.e._ a certain yearly tribute to his owner. These explanations will render intelligible the second passage referred to above and quoted below: Some three or four years before the Emancipation, I let my serfs go on _obrók_. When complying with the Emancipation Decree I arranged, as the law required, to leave the peasants in possession of the land they were cultivating on their own behalf, which amounted to rather less than eight acres per head, and (to my shame be it said) I added nothing thereto. The only thing I did--or the one evil I refrained from doing--was that I abstained from obliging the peasants to exchange land (as I was advised to do) and left them in possession of the pasture they needed. In general, however, I did not show any disinterested feeling in the affair. In the first edition of _Tolstoy and his Problems_ I erroneously stated that Tolstoy, before the Decree of Emancipation, voluntarily freed his serfs; and though this was corrected in the second edition, it is necessary to repeat the correction here, as the same mistake occurs in the article on Tolstoy in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_. I therefore quote the following passage from a letter he wrote me on the subject: I have received your book and read it with pleasure. The short biography is excellent, except the place where you, quoting the words of Sophia Andréyevna, say that 'he liberated his peasants before the Emancipation.' That is wrong: I placed them on _obrók_ instead of keeping them on _bárstchina_ [_i.e._ the state in which the peasants rendered labour dues]. It would not have been possible to emancipate them.... 1861