About this time he completed his _Memoirs of a Billiard Marker_, and sent it to the _Contemporary_ with a letter expressing his own dissatisfaction with the hasty workmanship of the story; it did not appear till more than a year later. He was also now at work on _Boyhood_. Seventeen years after Tolstoy had left the Caucasus, an officer stationed at Starogládovsk found his memory still fresh among the Cossacks, and saw Mariána (comparatively aged by that time), as well as several elderly Cossack hunters who had shot wild fowl and wild boars with Tolstoy. In his regiment he left the reputation of being an excellent narrator, who enthralled every one by his conversation. 1854 Not till January 1854 did the long-expected order arrive allowing him to pass the examination (a pure formality at that time) entitling him to become an officer. On the 19th he left for home, and on 2nd February reached Yásnaya, where he enjoyed a three weeks' stay with his Aunt Tatiána, his brother, and a friend. On this journey he encountered a severe storm, to which we owe _The Snow Storm_, published a couple of years later, and probably also much of the storm description in _Master and Man_, written in later life. The Russo-Turkish war had now begun in earnest, and, as a result of his application, he received orders to join the army of the Danube, which he set out accordingly to do. Of the Caucasian period of his life, as of his University days, Tolstoy has at different times expressed himself differently. To Birukóf, in 1905, he spoke of it as one of the best times of his life, notwithstanding all his deflections from his dimly recognised ideals. Yet two years earlier, writing of the four periods of his life, he had spoken of 'the terrible twenty years of coarse dissipation, the service of ambition, vanity, and above all, of lust,' which followed after the age of fourteen. But what it comes to is, that Tolstoy is a man of moods, and judges himself and others, sometimes by ordinary and sometimes by extraordinary standards. CHIEF AUTHORITIES FOR CHAPTER III Birukof. Behrs. U. Bitovt, _Graf L. Tolstoy v literatoure i iskousstve_: Petersburg, 1903. (Hereafter called 'Bitovt.') Though ill-arranged, this book is valuable to any one engaged on the difficult task of compiling a Bibliography of Tolstoy's works. Nekrasof's letters to Tolstoy published in the Literary Supplement to the _Niva_, February 1898. Much light is also thrown on this period of Tolstoy's life by the following works, which must not be considered autobiographical: _The Raid._ _The Wood-Felling._ _Meeting a Moscow Acquaintance._ _The Cossacks_, and _The Snow Storm_, as well as by stories included in Tolstoy's _Readers_: _Boulka._ _Boulka and the Wild Boar._ _Milton and Boulka._ _Boulka and the Wolf._ _What Happened to Boulka in Pyatigorsk._ _Boulka's and Milton's End._ _A Prisoner in the Caucasus._ CHAPTER IV