air-guns from their garret-windows at all passers-by, and most of the aristocratic students formed exclusive little coteries among themselves which were so engrossed with really important matters like balls, picnics, dramatic entertainments, and very often less reputable forms of amusement, that they had very little time left for mere study. Moreover, this easy, pleasant state of existence came all the easier because Kazan, in those days, was the regular place of resort in the summer-time for the county families of the whole country side, who flocked thither to educate their sons and find husbands for their grown-up daughters. The higher classes, all more or less closely connected, gloried in a large patriarchal hospitality. A young bachelor student of good family in those days need never keep his own table. Twenty or thirty houses were open to him daily without special invitation, he had only to pick and choose. A student, when once in the full swing of the thing, could rarely get to bed till five o’clock in the morning, and rarely rose till after twelve o’clock at noon. Tolstoi, in the character of “Nikolinka Irtenev,” has given us a vivid piece of self-portraiture as he was at Kazan. A morbid sensitiveness, a pitiful lack of moral and mental equilibrium, a consuming pride, and a disgust at his own privileged position which points to a latent reserve of nobility, is legible in every line of this description. His plainness was evidently one of his sorest troubles. “I was bashful by nature,” he tells us through the mouth of his hero, “but my bashfulness grew with the growing consciousness of my ugliness, . . . and like
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