Life in the forest is marvellously described--the misty mornings, the search for the stag's lair, the interpreting of his tracks, the swaying of innumerable boughs, the fear of the wild tribes; it is all here--the forest loneliness, the forest enchantment, the forest terror. Even the tiny gnats which cover Olyénin so that they make him grey from head to foot, have their own peculiar attraction; he grows to feel their stings a part of the forest fascination and freedom; they prevent him from growing somnolent, and keep him alive to that immense joy which he finds everywhere in nature and would not miss even for a moment. Throughout Tolstoy's later work he hates civilisation, and we understand why; he is always longing to escape from it to the life that is inspired by the immense joy of nature and freshened by hard physical toil. Characteristically enough, Tolstoy will not idealise even what he loves, and he confesses that the mere touch of civilisation spoils his Yeroshka; he cannot live like a modern man, and his hut is filthy. "On the table were flung his blood-stained coat, a half of a milk cake, and next to it a plucked and torn jackdaw.... On the dirty floor were thrown a net and a few dead pheasants, and a hen wandered about pecking, with its leg fastened to a table leg." In the forests which he so loves Yeroshka is like a wood-god--strong, wise, and happy--but he has only to touch the ordinary life of man and he becomes a Silenus, debased and drunken. {23} In 1853 Tolstoy left the Caucasus for the Crimea, the influence of his relatives procuring him a post on the staff of the Commander-in-Chief, Prince Gorchakoff. He could not rest until he reached Sebastopol itself, and he entered it in November 1854. He was often in great danger, for he volunteered for duty on the most dangerous posts, even on the famous fourth bastion, whose horrors have never been surpassed in war. Tolstoy published his _Tales from Sebastopol_ in 1854; this book aroused the attention of the Czar, and gained for the author a considerable literary reputation. But Tolstoy achieved something more than reputation, for his whole nature was deepened and widened; it was Sebastopol which first showed him the heroism and tragedy of human destiny, and taught him his immense appreciation of the common man. For him mere cynicism was henceforth at an end; no man who had beheld the sublime heroism of Sebastopol--twenty-two thousand perishing under fire, as many more suffering hideous tortures on the operating tables (without chloroform) and in the hospitals, all this borne not merely with fortitude, but with cheerfulness, not for the sake of any personal gain, but for the sake of an ideal--the ideal of patriotism--no man who had beheld this could relapse into that cheap cynicism which proclaims the essential worthlessness of the human kind.