Part 3 - Chapter 11 - Page 2

compressibility of hay, and its having settled down in the
stacks, and his swearing that everything had been done in the
fear of God, Levin stuck to his point that the hay had been
divided without his orders, and that, therefore, he would not
accept that hay as fifty loads to a stack. After a prolonged
dispute the matter was decided by the peasants taking these
eleven stacks, reckoning them as fifty loads each. The arguments
and the division of the haycocks lasted the whole afternoon.
When the last of the hay had been divided, Levin, intrusting the
superintendence of the rest to the counting-house clerk, sat down
on a haycock marked off by a stake of willow, and looked
admiringly at the meadow swarming with peasants.

In front of him, in the bend of the river beyond the marsh, moved
a bright-colored line of peasant women, and the scattered hay was
being rapidly formed into gray winding rows over the pale green
stubble. After the women came the men with pitchforks, and from
the gray rows there were growing up broad, high, soft haycocks.
To the left, carts were rumbling over the meadow that had been
already cleared, and one after another the haycocks vanished,
flung up in huge forkfuls, and in their place there were rising
heavy cartloads of fragrant hay hanging over the horses'
hind-quarters.

"What weather for haying! What hay it'll be!" said an old man,
squatting down beside Levin. "It's tea, not hay! It's like
scattering grain to the ducks, the way they pick it up!" he
added, pointing to the growing haycocks. "Since dinnertime
they've carried a good half of it."

"The last load, eh?" he shouted to a young peasant, who drove by,
standing in the front of an empty cart, shaking the cord reins.

"The last, dad!" the lad shouted back, pulling in the horse, and,
smiling, he looked round at a bright, rosy-checked peasant girl
who sat in the cart smiling too, and drove on.

"Who's that? Your son?" asked Levin.

"My baby," said the old man with a tender smile.

"What a fine fellow!"

"The lad's all right."

"Married already?"

"Yes, it's two years last St. Philip's day."

"Any children?"

"Children indeed! Why, for over a year he was innocent as a babe
himself, and bashful too," answered the old man. "Well, the hay!
It's as fragrant as tea!" he repeated, wishing to change the
subject.

Levin looked more attentively at Ivan Parmenov and his wife.
They were loading a haycock onto the cart not far from him. Ivan
Parmenov was standing on the cart, taking, laying in place, and
stamping down the huge bundles of hay, which his pretty young
wife deftly handed up to him, at first in armfuls, and then on
the pitchfork. The young wife