Such a winning fellow as that Vanka was, from the very start!  After I had concluded the bargain for an extra horse and an apron which his carriage lacked, he persuaded me that one horse was enough—­at the price of two.  To save time I yielded, deducting twenty-five cents only from the sum agreed on, lest I should appear too easily cheated.  That sense of being ridiculed as an inexperienced simpleton, when I had merely paid my interlocutor the compliment of trusting him, never ceased to be a pain and a terror to me.

The friendly policemen smiled impartially upon Vanka and us, as they helped to pack us in the drosky.

Tula as we saw it on our way out, and as we had seen it during our morning stroll, did not look like a town of sixty-four thousand inhabitants, or an interesting place of residence.  It was a good type of the provincial Russian town.  There were the broad unpaved, or badly paved, dusty streets.  There were the stone official buildings, glaring white in the sun, interspersed with wooden houses, ranging from the pretentious dwelling to the humble shelter of logs.

For fifteen versts (ten miles) after we had left all these behind us, we drove through a lovely rolling country, on a fine macadamized highway leading to the south and to Kieff.  The views were wide, fresh, and fair.  Hayfields, plowed fields, fields of green oats, yellowing rye, blue-flowered flax, with birch and leaf trees in small groves near at hand, and forests in the distance, varied the scene.  Evergreens were rarer here, and oak-trees more plentiful, than north of Moscow.  The grass by the roadside was sown thickly with wild flowers:  Canterbury bells, campanulas, yarrow pink and white, willow-weed (good to adulterate tea), yellow daisies, spiraea, pinks, corn-flowers, melilot, honey-sweet galium, yellow everlasting, huge deep-crimson crane’s-bill, and hosts of others.

Throughout this sweet drive my merry izvostchik delighted me with his discourse.  It began thus.  I asked, “Did he know Count Tolstoy?”

“Did he know Count Tolstoy?  Everybody knew him.  He was the first gentleman in the empire [!].  There was not another such man in all the land.”

“Could he read?  Had he read the count’s ’Tales’?”

“Yes.  He had read every one of the count’s books that he could lay his hands on.  Did I mean the little books with the colored covers and the pictures on the outside?” (He alluded to the little peasant “Tales” in their original cheap form, costing two or three cents apiece.) “Unfortunately they were forbidden, or not to be had at the Tula shops, and though there were libraries which had them, they were not for such as he."*