The efforts of Agafea Mihalovna and the cook, that the dinner should be particularly good, only ended in the two famished friends attacking the preliminary course, eating a great deal of bread and butter, salt goose and salted mushrooms, and in Levin’s finally ordering the soup to be served without the accompaniment of little pies, with which the cook had particularly meant to impress their visitor.  But though Stepan Arkadyevitch was accustomed to very different dinners, he thought everything excellent:  the herb brandy, and the bread, and the butter, and above all the salt goose and the mushrooms, and the nettle soup, and the chicken in white sauce, and the white Crimean wine—­ everything was superb and delicious.

“Splendid, splendid!” he said, lighting a fat cigar after the roast.  “I feel as if, coming to you, I had landed on a peaceful shore after the noise and jolting of a steamer.  And so you maintain that the laborer himself is an element to be studied and to regulate the choice of methods in agriculture.  Of course, I’m an ignorant outsider; but I should fancy theory and its application will have its influence on the laborer too.”

“Yes, but wait a bit.  I’m not talking of political economy, I’m talking of the science of agriculture.  It ought to be like the natural sciences, and to observe given phenomena and the laborer in his economic, ethnographical...”

At that instant Agafea Mihalovna came in with jam.

“Oh, Agafea Mihalovna,” said Stepan Arkadyevitch, kissing the tips of his plump fingers, “what salt goose, what herb brandy!...What do you think, isn’t it time to start, Kostya?” he added.

Levin looked out of the window at the sun sinking behind the bare tree-tops of the forest.

“Yes, it’s time,” he said.  “Kouzma, get ready the trap,” and he ran downstairs.

Stepan Arkadyevitch, going down, carefully took the canvas cover off his varnished gun case with his own hands, and opening it, began to get ready his expensive new-fashioned gun.  Kouzma, who already scented a big tip, never left Stepan Arkadyevitch’s side, and put on him both his stockings and boots, a task which Stepan Arkadyevitch readily left him.

“Kostya, give orders that if the merchant Ryabinin comes...I told him to come today, he’s to be brought in and to wait for me...”

“Why, do you mean to say you’re selling the forest to Ryabinin?”

“Yes.  Do you know him?”

“To be sure I do.  I have had to do business with him, ‘positively and conclusively.’”

Stepan Arkadyevitch laughed.  “Positively and conclusively” were the merchant’s favorite words.

“Yes, it’s wonderfully funny the way he talks.  She knows where her master’s going!” he added, patting Laska, who hung about Levin, whining and licking his hands, his boots, and his gun.

The trap was already at the steps when they went out.

“I told them to bring the trap round; or would you rather walk?”