CHAPTER V

THE OPEN LAND

The town of Toula--The road to the country--The travelling peasant--The wayside inn--A country house--Landowners at home--A typical village--A cottage interior--The stove and the loom--Doubts on the Mir--A beggar for scraps--Flogging for taxes--Tolstoy on the End of an Age--How Empires will now cease--The aged prophet--The restoration of the land--The rotting towns--New ideals of statesmanship--Indifference to poets and Shakespeare--The grace of sanctity and the limitations of logic 81