Next day we set to work to continue the story. When I asked Fédka if he had thought of a continuation, he only waved his hand and remarked: 'I know, I know!... Who will do the writing?'... We resumed the work, and again the boys showed the same enthusiasm, and the same sense of artistic truth and proportion. Half-way through the lesson I had to leave them. They wrote two pages without me, as just in feeling and as true to life as the preceding ones. These two pages were rather poorer in detail, some of the details were not quite happily placed, and there were also a couple of repetitions. All this had evidently occurred because the actual writing was a difficulty for them. On the third day we had similar success.... There could no longer be any doubt or thought of its being a mere accident. We had obviously succeeded in finding a more natural and inspiring method than any we had previously tried. This unfinished story was accidentally destroyed. Tolstoy was greatly annoyed, and Fédka and Syómka, though they did not understand his vexation, offered to stay the night at his house and reproduce it. After eight o'clock, when school was over, they came, and (to Tolstoy's great pleasure) locked themselves into his study, where at first they were heard laughing but then became very quiet. On listening at the door Tolstoy heard their subdued voices discussing the story, and heard also the scratching of a pen. At midnight he knocked and was admitted. Syómka was standing at the large table, writing busily; his lines running crookedly across the paper and his pen constantly seeking the inkstand. Fédka told Tolstoy to 'wait a bit,' and insisted on Syómka's adding something more, to his dictation. At last Tolstoy took the exercise-book; and the lads, after enjoying a merry supper of potatoes and _kvás_, divested themselves of their sheepskin coats and lay down to sleep under the writing table; their 'charming, healthy, childish, peasant laughter' still ringing through the room. The story just mentioned, and other stories written by the children, were published in the magazine; and Tolstoy declares them to be, in their way, superior to anything else in Russian literature. It was largely on the model of these peasant children's stories that, years later, he wrote his own famous stories for the people. The rules for encouraging composition which he deduces from his experience are these: (1) To offer as large and varied a choice of themes as possible; not inventing them specially for the children, but offering such as most interest the teacher and seem to him most important. (2) To give children stories written by children to read, and to offer only children's compositions as models; because these are juster, finer and more moral than those written by adults.