I CAN remember the house at Yasnaya Polyana in the
condition it was in the first years after my father's marriage.

It was one of the two-storied wings of the old mansion-house
of the Princes Volkonsky, which my father had sold for
pulling down when he was still a bachelor.

From what my father has told me, I know that the house in
which he was born and spent his youth was a three-storied
building with thirty-six rooms. On the spot where it stood,
between the two wings, the remains of the old stone foundation
are still visible in the form of trenches filled with rubble, and
the site is covered with big sixty-year-old trees that my father
himself planted.

When any one asked my father where he was born, he used to
point to a tall larch which grew on the site of the old
foundations.

"Up there where the top of that larch waves," he used to
say; "that's where my mother's room was, where I was born on a
leather sofa."

My father seldom spoke of his mother, but when he did, it
was delightful to hear him, because the mention of her awoke an
unusual strain of gentleness and tenderness in him. There was
such a ring of respectful affection, so much reverence for her
memory, in his words, that we all looked on her as a sort of
saint.