to repress anger and excitability in himself, to be gentle with everybody, to tame his pride, and continued his struggle against evil passions and habits.
Town-life began to be very heavy for him, and when the occasion presented itself he would return to Yasnaya Polyana. Sometimes he travelled the whole distance on foot. In the village he invariably threw himself heart and soul into the peasants’ work—ploughing, mowing, cutting wood, building peasants’ huts, especially for widows and orphans.
The spreading of his new views and his new way of living soon began to attract those people in whom the same ideas and feelings were slumbering, but who awaited a powerful initiative before starting together upon a new road. Some of these people came to him, others Tolstoy found himself; and in this way was formed around him a circle of new men, quite different from his former acquaintances. With the latter he did not break formally, but they left him little by little, feeling unable to follow him. The remarkable peasant Sutaieff, the painter N. Gay, the teacher Orloff, Feodoroff, the librarian of the Roumiantsef Museum, the peasant Bondaref (afterwards exiled to Siberia)—such as these were Tolstoy’s new friends. The light of his faith began to penetrate also his former social circle;
