Page 527 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

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

526 of 1759