To reap and bind the rye and oats and to carry it, to mow the meadows, turn over the fallows, thrash the seed and sow the winter corn—­all this seems so simple and ordinary; but to succeed in getting through it all everyone in the village, from the old man to the young child, must toil incessantly for three or four weeks, three times as hard as usual, living on rye-beer, onions, and black bread, thrashing and carrying the sheaves at night, and not giving more than two or three hours in the twenty-four to sleep.  And every year this is done all over Russia.

Having lived the greater part of his life in the country and in the closest relations with the peasants, Levin always felt in this busy time that he was infected by this general quickening of energy in the people.

In the early morning he rode over to the first sowing of the rye, and to the oats, which were being carried to the stacks, and returning home at the time his wife and sister-in-law were getting up, he drank coffee with them and walked to the farm, where a new thrashing machine was to be set working to get ready the seed-corn.

He was standing in the cool granary, still fragrant with the leaves of the hazel branches interlaced on the freshly peeled aspen beams of the new thatch roof.  He gazed through the open door in which the dry bitter dust of the thrashing whirled and played, at the grass of the thrashing floor in the sunlight and the fresh straw that had been brought in from the barn, then at the speckly-headed, white-breasted swallows that flew chirping in under the roof and, fluttering their wings, settled in the crevices of the doorway, then at the peasants bustling in the dark, dusty barn, and he thought strange thoughts.

“Why is it all being done?” he thought.  “Why am I standing here, making them work?  What are they all so busy for, trying to show their zeal before me?  What is that old Matrona, my old friend, toiling for? (I doctored her, when the beam fell on her in the fire)” he thought, looking at a thin old woman who was raking up the grain, moving painfully with her bare, sun-blackened feet over the uneven, rough floor.  “Then she recovered, but today or tomorrow or in ten years she won’t; they’ll bury her, and nothing will be left either of her or of that smart girl in the red jacket, who with that skillful, soft action shakes the ears out of their husks.  They’ll bury her and this piebald horse, and very soon too,” he thought, gazing at the heavily moving, panting horse that kept walking up the wheel that turned under him.  “And they will bury her and Fyodor the thrasher with his curly beard full of chaff and his shirt torn on his white shoulders—­they will bury him.  He’s untying the sheaves, and giving orders, and shouting to the women, and quickly setting straight the strap on the moving wheel.  And what’s more, it’s not them alone—­me they’ll bury too, and nothing will be left.  What for?”

He thought this, and at the same time looked at his watch to reckon how much they thrashed in an hour.  He wanted to know this so as to judge by it the task to set for the day.