I remember her dear good-natured laugh, and her face shining with pleasure. The religious feeling which filled her soul was evidently so important to her, so much higher than anything else, that she could not be angry or annoyed at anything, and could not attribute to worldly matters the importance others attach to them. 1840 In the summer of 1839 the whole family assembled at Yásnaya Polyána. The next year, 1840, was a famine year. The crops were so poor that corn had to be bought to feed the serfs, and to raise funds for this purpose one of the Tolstoys' estates had to be sold. The supply of oats for the horses was stopped, and Tolstoy remembers how he and his brothers, pitying their ponies, secretly gathered oats for them in the peasants' fields, quite unconscious of the crime they were committing. 1841 In the autumn of that year the whole family moved to Moscow, returning to Yásnaya for the following summer. The next autumn their guardian, the kind good Countess Alexandra Osten-Saken, died in the Convent or 'Hermitage' founded by Óptin (a robber chief of the fourteenth century) in the Government of Kaloúga, to which she had retired. After her death her sister, Pelagéya Ilýnishna Úshkof, became their guardian. She was the wife of a Kazán landowner. Aunty Tatiána and she were not on friendly terms; there was no open quarrel between them, but V. I. Úshkof (Pelagéya's husband) had been a suitor for Tatiána's hand in his youth, and had been refused. Pelagéya could not forgive her husband's old love for Tatiána. The change of guardianship led to the removal of the family to Kazán, and to the children being separated from Aunty Tatiána, much to her grief. The books which up to the age of fourteen, when he went to Kazán, had most influenced Tolstoy were, he tells us, the Story of Joseph from the Bible, the _Forty Thieves_ and _Prince Kamaralzaman_ from the _Arabian Nights_, various Russian folk-legends, Poúshkin's _Tales_ and his poem _Napoleon_, and _The Black Hen_ by Pogorélsky. The influence the story of Joseph had on him, he says, was 'immense.' In his aptitude for abstract speculation, as in other respects, the boy was truly father to the man; and in a passage, certainly autobiographical, in _Boyhood_, he says: It will hardly be believed what were the favourite and most common subjects of my reflections in my boyhood--so incompatible were they with my age and situation. But in my opinion incompatibility between a man's position and his moral activity is the surest sign of truth....