He goes on to say that he was starting next day for the Government of Pénza to look at an estate he meant to buy 'in those out-of-the-way parts.' The servant who accompanied Tolstoy has told how they travelled third class from Moscow to Nízhni, and how Tolstoy chatted with his fellow-travellers, so that many of them took him 'for a common man.' The idea of buying the estate in Pénza was ultimately abandoned. He had by then completed the last part of _War and Peace_, which was to appear complete in book form in November. Two volumes had been published in 1866, three more in 1868, and the sixth was not ready till this year, 1869. (In subsequent editions the book was rearranged, first into five and then into four volumes.) Though he had so completely conquered the laziness of which he accused himself in early manhood as to have become a regular, indefatigable and extremely hard worker, yet after the completion of so gigantic a task he felt the need of recuperation and in summer wrote to Fet: 'It is now my deadest time: I neither write nor think, but feel happily stupid,' and he adds that he goes out shooting woodcock and has killed eight at an outing. That at this time he already felt something of the strong repugnance he so strenuously expressed in later years for luxury and profuse expenditure, is indicated by his comment on the death of his acquaintance, the author V. P. Bótkin, which took place in 1869. The latter, a member of a wealthy family of tea-merchants, having lived with economy till he knew his death was approaching, then hired a splendid lodging in Petersburg, fitted it up with all possible comfort and luxury, engaged a _chef_ from the kitchen of the Tsarévitch, paid daily attention to the dinner _menu_, and engaged famous musicians to perform quartets at his lodgings. To the magnificent feasts he gave every day (at which, owing to the state of his health, he himself participated chiefly as a spectator) he gathered a select circle of those friends whose conversation interested him. He told his brother that these arrangements for the close of his life gave him the keenest pleasure, and that 'birds of Paradise are singing in my soul.' On 4th October a quartet and a banquet had been arranged as usual, and many guests were expected--but V. P. Bótkin lay dead in his bed. Tolstoy, hearing of this, wrote to Fet: I was terribly shocked by the character of V. P. Bótkin's death. If what is told of it is true, it is terrible. How is it that among his friends not one was found to give to that supreme moment of life the character suitable to it?