“If we can manage it, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” said the bailiff.

“Why ever shouldn’t you manage it?”

“We positively must have another fifteen laborers.  And they don’t turn up.  There were some here today asking seventy roubles for the summer.”

Levin was silent.  Again he was brought face to face with that opposing force.  He knew that however much they tried, they could not hire more than forty—­thirty-seven perhaps or thirty-eight—­ laborers for a reasonable sum.  Some forty had been taken on, and there were no more.  But still he could not help struggling against it.

“Send to Sury, to Tchefirovka; if they don’t come we must look for them.”

“Oh, I’ll send, to be sure,” said Vassily Fedorovitch despondently.  “But there are the horses, too, they’re not good for much.”

“We’ll get some more.  I know, of course,” Levin added laughing, “you always want to do with as little and as poor quality as possible; but this year I’m not going to let you have things your own way.  I’ll see to everything myself.”

“Why, I don’t think you take much rest as it is.  It cheers us up to work under the master’s eye...”

“So they’re sowing clover behind the Birch Dale?  I’ll go and have a look at them,” he said, getting on to the little bay cob, Kolpik, who was led up by the coachman.

“You can’t get across the streams, Konstantin Dmitrievitch,” the coachman shouted.

“All right, I’ll go by the forest.”

And Levin rode through the slush of the farmyard to the gate and out into the open country, his good little horse, after his long inactivity, stepping out gallantly, snorting over the pools, and asking, as it were, for guidance.  If Levin had felt happy before in the cattle pens and farmyard, he felt happier yet in the open country.  Swaying rhythmically with the ambling paces of his good little cob, drinking in the warm yet fresh scent of the snow and the air, as he rode through his forest over the crumbling, wasted snow, still left in parts, and covered with dissolving tracks, he rejoiced over every tree, with the moss reviving on its bark and the buds swelling on its shoots.  When he came out of the forest, in the immense plain before him, his grass fields stretched in an unbroken carpet of green, without one bare place or swamp, only spotted here and there in the hollows with patches of melting snow.  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.