Anna Karenina - LimpidSoft

PART THREE CHAPTER 2
Chapter 2
EARLY in June it happened that Agafea Mihalovna, the old nurse and housekeeper,
in carrying to the cellar a jar of mushrooms she had just pickled, slipped, fell,
and sprained her wrist. The district doctor, a talkative young medical student, who
had just finished his studies, came to see her. He examined the wrist, said it was
not broken, was delighted at a chance of talking to the celebrated Sergey Ivanovitch
Koznishev, and to show his advanced views of things told him all the scandal of
the district, complaining of the poor state into which the district council had fallen.
Sergey Ivanovitch listened attentively, asked him questions, and, roused by a new
listener, he talked fluently, uttered a few keen and weighty observations, respectfully
appreciated by the young doctor, and was soon in that eager frame of mind his
brother knew so well, which always, with him, followed a brilliant and eager conversation.
After the departure of the doctor, he wanted to go with a fishing rod to
the river. Sergey Ivanovitch was fond of angling, and was, it seemed, proud of being
able to care for such a stupid occupation.
Konstantin Levin, whose presence was needed in the plough land and meadows,
had come to take his brother in the trap.
It was that time of the year, the turning-point of summer, when the crops of the
present year are a certainty, when one begins to think of the sowing for next year, and
the mowing is at hand; when the rye is all in ear, though its ears are still light, not
yet full, and it waves in gray-green billows in the wind; when the green oats, with
tufts of yellow grass scattered here and there among it, droop irregularly over the
late-sown fields; when the early buckwheat is already out and hiding the ground;
when the fallow lands, trodden hard as stone by the cattle, are half ploughed over,
with paths left untouched by the plough; when from the dry dung-heaps carted onto
the fields there comes at sunset a smell of manure mixed with meadow-sweet, and
on the low-lying lands the riverside meadows are a thick sea of grass waiting for the
mowing, with blackened heaps of the stalks of sorrel among it.
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. Levin counted the carts, and was pleased that all that were wanted had
been brought, and at the sight of the meadows his thoughts passed to the mowing.
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