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light, but a sense of desolation oppressed us as we drew near
the village. No smoke was rising anywhere. Most of the
izbas were roofless, having been stripped for fuel. No living
creature was to be seen, except two or three skin-covered
skeletons of horses, picking a blade or two of old and rotten
grass in front of a recently-dismantled izba, and a few
forlorn-looking dogs, almost too starved to move from their places on
the dirt-heaps in front of the huts. Death or desertion had
emptied many of these, and in almost every house we entered
there were persons sick of typhus, small-pox, &c. All the
help received from the authorities was consumed, most of the
cattle had died, and for food they used a kind of bread made
of dried and powdered grass, chaff, straw, and leaves from
trees. Those who were not ill with fever, &c., were almost too
weak to move or speak.
We reached home just before Count Tolstoi, whose good
spirits were in great contrast to our weariness. He talked and
laughed merrily, and his eyes fairly beamed with joy. The
cause of his delight was soon told. He had finally overcome
all obstacles and established his children’s eating-room. A
simple matter this, to our ideas, but it had cost him many a
weary day of struggle against difficulties. The mere procuring
of suitable food was hard enough, but there was also the
ignorance, superstition, and folly of the mushiks, and the bitter
opposition of the clergy to overcome. The mushiks wanted the
children’s food brought to their homes, but Tolstoi knew well
that in that case the children would get but little of it. Then
the priests frightened them with tales of learned theologians
having conclusively proved out of the Book of Revelation that
Tolstoi was veritably Antichrist. The story of his branding
the mushiks on the forehead to seal them to the power of the
devil has already been alluded to; in this foolish and wicked
story which was preached from the pulpit, it was said that the
Count paid the peasants eight roubles apiece as purchase-money.
Only the Sunday before a Bishop had delivered a
special sermon in the second-class waiting-room at the railway
station at Klekotki, before a crowded audience, dishing up all
these fables and denouncing the Count in the strongest terms
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