Among the best are stories of his dogs, Milton and Bulka; tales of bear-hunting and its perils; there is an unforgettable study of the hare and its timid ways, {27} another which tells how mother-wolves train their young to hunt. Nor does Tolstoy limit his sympathies to animals--he can make the trees live for us in the same vivid and forcible way; thus he tells how hundreds of young poplars sprang up around an old poplar which was decaying, and how he ordered the young trees to be cut down since he could see that they were taking the sap from the old one. The young trees resisted stoutly: "Sometimes four of us would try to pull up the roots of some young poplar that had been cut down, and found it impossible; it would resist with all its might and would not die." However he persists in destroying them; the old tree itself dies and Tolstoy comments: "He had been long dying, and was conscious of it, and was giving all his life to his shoots. That was the reason why they had grown so rapidly, and I, who had wished to help him, had only killed all his children." Perfectly charming also are the little studies of peasant children, such as the boy "Filipok," who is passionately eager to go to school but, when he gets there, cannot say a word through shyness; however they leave him alone, and he comes to himself and makes one of the best scholars. Tolstoy's own educational experiments were not permitted to continue for long; the officials became jealous of his schools, and they were accordingly closed. In dividing out the land between the nobles and the peasants many disputes occurred, and Tolstoy offered his services as arbitrator; he incurred a good deal of odium among his aristocratic neighbours because he so often took the part of the poor; he saw how the peasants were steadily cheated out of their fair share of land. It is this unfair division which explains the terrible severity of the Russian famines; the peasant has never been allowed sufficient land to support himself, and he cannot, with his best efforts, keep any reserve for bad times. Tolstoy perceived this and, to the best of his ability, struggled against it; like the heroism of the common soldier at Sebastopol, it served its purpose in making him the ardent champion of the poor. {28} In the year 1862 Tolstoy married Sophia Behrs, with whose family he had been for some time acquainted; he was thirty-four and his bride eighteen. There ensued a period of great family happiness and of powerful creative work. It was, in the ordinary sense, the happiest time of Tolstoy's life, though he himself, with his ever-progressing moral development and his ever-increasing idealism, later on condemned its happiness as selfish and enervating.