Page 1271 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

only known to sportsmen. Washed and clean, they went
into a hay-barn swept ready for them, where the
coachman had been making up beds for the gentlemen.
Though it was dusk, not one of them wanted to go to

sleep.
After wavering among reminiscences and anecdotes of
guns, of dogs, and of former shooting parties, the
conversation rested on a topic that interested all of them.
After Vassenka had several times over expressed his
appreciation of this delightful sleeping place among the
fragrant hay, this delightful broken cart (he supposed it to
be broken because the shafts had been taken out), of the
good nature of the peasants that had treated him to vodka,
of the dogs who lay at the feet of their respective masters,
Oblonsky began telling them of a delightful shooting party
at Malthus’s, where he had stayed the previous summer.
Malthus was a well-known capitalist, who had made his
money by speculation in railway shares. Stepan
Arkadyevitch described what grouse moors this Malthus
had bought in the Tver province, and how they were
preserved, and of the carriages and dogcarts in which the
shooting party had been driven, and the luncheon pavilion
that had been rigged up at the marsh.

1270 of 1759