Page 598 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

brought up directly, to lift one stack, and carry it into the
barn. There turned out to be only thirty-two loads in the
stack. In spite of the village elder’s assertions about the
compressibility of hay, and its having settled down in the

stacks, and his swearing that everything had been done in
the fear of God, Levin stuck to his point that the hay had
been divided without his orders, and that, therefore, he
would not accept that hay as fifty loads to a stack. After a
prolonged dispute the matter was decided by the peasants
taking these eleven stacks, reckoning them as fifty loads
each. The arguments and the division of the haycocks
lasted the whole afternoon. When the last of the hay had
been divided, Levin, intrusting the superintendence of the
rest to the counting-house clerk, sat down on a haycock
marked off by a stake of willow, and looked admiringly at
the meadow swarming with peasants.
In front of him, in the bend of the river beyond the
marsh, moved a bright-colored line of peasant women,
and the scattered hay was being rapidly formed into gray
winding rows over the pale green stubble. After the
women came the men with pitchforks, and from the gray
rows there were growing up broad, high, soft haycocks.
To the left, carts were rumbling over the meadow that had
been already cleared, and one after another the haycocks

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