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.  He always felt something special moving him to the quick at the hay-making.  On reaching the meadow Levin stopped the horse.

The morning dew was still lying on the thick undergrowth of the grass, and that he might not get his feet wet, Sergey Ivanovitch asked his brother to drive him in the trap up to the willow tree from which the carp was caught.  Sorry as Konstantin Levin was to crush down his mowing grass, he drove him into the meadow.  The high grass softly turned about the wheels and the horse’s legs, leaving its seeds clinging to the wet axles and spokes of the wheels.  His brother seated himself under a bush, arranging his tackle, while Levin led the horse away, fastened him up, and walked into the vast gray-green sea of grass unstirred by the wind.  The silky grass with its ripe seeds came almost to his waist in the dampest spots.