Page 433 of 2288

He was not put out of temper even by the sight of the peasants'

horses and colts trampling down his young grass (he told a

peasant he met to drive them out), nor by the sarcastic and

stupid reply of the peasant Ipat, whom he met on the way, and

asked, "Well, Ipat, shall we soon be sowing?" "We must get the

ploughing done first, Konstantin Dmitrievitch," answered Ipat.

The further he rode, the happier he became, and plans for the

land rose to his mind each better than the last; to plant all his

fields with hedges along the southern borders, so that the snow

should not lie under them; to divide them up into six fields of

arable and three of pasture and hay; to build a cattle yard at

the further end of the estate, and to dig a pond and to construct

movable pens for the cattle as a means of manuring the land. And

then eight hundred acres of wheat, three hundred of potatoes, and

four hundred of clover, and not one acre exhausted.