One of the most enjoyable incidents of the evening was the rehearsal of the maid’s coquettish steps and graces given by one of our young hostesses for the benefit of those members of the family who had not been present.  It reminded us of the scene in “War and Peace” after the hunt, when charming young Countess Natalya Ilinitchna astonishes her old relative by her artistic performance of the Russian dance, which she must have inherited with the traditions of her native land, since she had never learned it.

Balalaika duets were one of the joys of our evenings under the trees, after dinner.  The young men played extremely well, and the popular airs were fascinating.  Our favorite was the “Barynya-Sudarynya,” which invariably brings out volleys of laughter and plaudits when it is sung on the stage.  Even a person who hears it played for the first time and is ignorant of the words is constrained to laughter by the merry air.  In the evenings there were also hare-and-hounds hunts through the meadows and forests, bonfires over which the younger members of the family jumped in peasant fashion, and other amusements.

In consequence of vegetarian indiscretions and of trifling with his health in other ways during the exceptionally hot weather then prevailing, the count fell ill.  When he got about a little he delighted to talk of death.  He said he felt that he was not going to live long, and was glad of it.  He asked what we thought of death and the other world, declaring that the future life must be far better than this, though in what it consisted he could not feel any certainty.  Naturally he did not agree with our view, that for the lucky ones this world provides a very fair idea of heaven, because his ideal was not happiness for all, but misery for all.  He will be forced to revise this ideal if he ever really comes to believe in heaven.

During this illness I persuaded him to read “Looking Backward,” which I had received as I was leaving Moscow.  When I presented it to him, he promised to examine it “some time;” but when I give books I like to hear the opinion of the recipient in detail, and I had had experience when I gave him “Robert Elsmere.”  Especially in this case was I anxious to discuss the work.

At first he was very favorably impressed, and said that he would translate the book into Russian.  He believed that this was the true way:  that people should have, literally, all things in common, and so on.  I replied that matters would never arrive at the state described unless this planet were visited by another deluge, and neither Noah nor any other animal endowed with the present human attributes saved to continue this selfish species.  I declared that nothing short of a new planet, Utopia, and a newly created, selected, and combined race of Utopian angels, would ever get as far as the personages in that book, not to speak of remaining in equilibrium on that dizzy point when it should have been once attained.  He disagreed with me, and an argument royal ensued.  In the course of it he said that his only objection lay in the degree of luxury in which the characters of the new perfection lived.