Page:The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoi - 08 (Crowell, 1899).djvu/334

320 make such a contrast to her natural disposition. I feel that she is a good girl, because her mother has never complained of her or had any grief from her. On the other hand, I feel that she, with her fondness for finery, her snatches of song, and her stories of village gossip, picked up during her field work in summer or the street in winter, is the only one during the gloomy time of the soldier's absence to represent gayety, youth, and hope. There is reason in it when he says that the only joy was when the sister was married; there is reason in his describing the wedding gayeties with such loving detail; there is reason in his making his mother say after the wedding:—

"Now we can have a good time all through."

Evidently after the sister was married they lost the cheerfulness and joy which she brought into their home. All the description of the wedding is extraordinarily good.

There are details at which you cannot help feeling some perplexity, and remembering that it was written by a lad eleven years old, you ask yourself: "Isn't this sudden?"

Thus, you see from this concise and powerful description of an eleven-year-old boy, not taller than a table, with intelligent and observant little eyes, a boy whom no one had ever given any attention to, but gifted with memory, and

When he wanted a little bread, for instance, he did not say that he asked it of his mother, but said that he begged his mother. And this was said deliberately, and said because he remembered his size as compared to his mother's, and his relations to his mother, timid in the presence of others, but intimate when they were alone together.

Another of the multitude of observations which he was able to make at the time of the marriage ceremony he remembered, and he wrote precisely what for him and for each one of us outlines the whole character of these ceremonies. When they said that it was sad, the