Pagina 669 de 2288

It was the time when there comes a brief pause in the toil of the

fields before the beginning of the labors of harvest-every year

recurring, every year straining every nerve of the peasants. The

crop was a splendid one, and bright, hot summer days had set in

with short, dewy nights.

The brothers had to drive through the woods to reach the meadows.

Sergey Ivanovitch was all the while admiring the beauty of the

woods, which were a tangled mass of leaves, pointing out to his

brother now an old lime tree on the point of flowering, dark on

the shady side, and brightly spotted with yellow stipules, now

the young shoots of this year's saplings brilliant with emerald.

Konstantin Levin did not like talking and hearing about the

beauty of nature. Words for him took away the beauty of what he

saw. He assented to what his brother said, but he could not help

beginning to think of other things. When they came out of the

woods, all his attention was engrossed by the view of the fallow

land on the upland, in parts yellow with grass, in parts trampled

and checkered with furrows, in parts dotted with ridges of dung,

and in parts even ploughed. A string of carts was moving across

it.