“Have you ever visited a church of the Old Believers?” Count Tolstoy asked me one evening.  We were sitting round the supper-table at Count Tolstoy’s house in Moscow.  I was just experimenting on some pickled mushrooms from Yasnaya Polyana,—­the daintiest little mushrooms which I encountered in that mushroom-eating land.  The mushrooms and question furnished a diversion which was needed.  The baby and younger children were in bed.  The elders of the family, some relatives, and ourselves had been engaged in a lively discussion; or, rather, I had been discussing matters with the count, while the others joined in from time to time.  It began with the Moscow beggars.

“I understand them now, and what you wrote of them,” I said.  “I have neither the purse of Fortunatus nor a heart of flint.  If I refuse their prayers, I feel wicked; if I give them five kopeks, I feel mean.  It seems too little to help them to anything but vodka; and if I give ten kopeks, they hold it out at arm’s length, look at it and me suspiciously; and then I feel so provoked that I give not a copper to any one for days.  It seems to do no good.”

“No,” said Count Tolstoy with a troubled look; “it does no good.  Giving money to any one who asks is not doing good; it is a mere civility.  If a beggar asks me for five kopeks, or five rubles, or five hundred rubles, I must give it to him as a politeness, nothing more, provided I have it about me.  It probably always goes for vodka.”

“But what is one to do?  I have sometimes thought that I would buy my man some bread and see that he ate it when he specifies what the money is for.  But, by a singular coincidence, they never ask for bread-money within eye-shot of a bakery.  I suppose that it would be better for me to take the trouble to hunt one up and give the bread.”

“No; for you only buy the bread.  It costs you no personal labor.”

“But suppose I had made the bread?—­I can make capital bread, only I cannot make it here where I have no conveniences; so I give the money instead.”

“If you had made the bread, still you would not have raised the grain, —­plowed, sowed, reaped, threshed, and ground it.  It would not be your labor.”

“If that is the case, then I have just done a very evil thing.  I have made some caps for the Siberian exiles in the Forwarding Prison.  It would have been better to let their shaved heads freeze.”

“Why?  You gave your labor, your time.  In that time you could probably have done something that would have pleased you better.”

“Certainly.  But if one is to dig up the roots of one’s deeds and motives, mine might be put thus:  The caps were manufactured from remnants of wool which were of no use to me and only encumbered my trunk.  I refused to go and deliver them myself.  They were put with a lot of other caps made from scraps on equally vicious principles.  And, moreover, I neither plowed the land, sowed the grass, fed the sheep, sheared him, cleansed and spun the wool, and so on; neither did I manufacture the needle for the work.”