and teach him, and side by side they sat on two stools in a little room near Tolstoy's study.
Tolstoy was never satisfied until he had done the job exactly as the shoemaker did it. Groaning with the effort of threading a waxed thread, he would refuse the assistance of the bearded man. "I'll do it!—No, no—I'll do it myself, it's the only way to learn," he would say.
As to the boots which Tolstoy made, a man to whom he had given a pair and who had worn them, was asked whether they were well made. "Couldn't be worse," was his reply.
Now for a time the whole Tolstoy family and their friends were filled with this enthusiasm for outdoor work. They rose early, and in company with the peasants the Tolstoy children and their mother, in a Russian dress, uncles, aunts, and even grandmothers, mowed the grass and strove to outdo the other. They had no theories about it, but simply found it a change and a pleasant satisfactory way of taking exercise.
All sorts of people now made pilgrimages to Yasnaya, to learn how to live, for Tolstoy's fame as a teacher had begun to go about the land. Rich aristocrats wanted to throw away their gold and do the housework, and a governess of the Tolstoys, who has written rather malicious though amusing accounts of Tolstoy's life at this time, describes enthusiastic ladies who came to Yasnaya and manured the fields in white dressing jackets!
