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sure this rural laziness is to me. Not an idea in one’s brain, as empty as
a drum!”
But Konstantin Levin found it dull sitting and listening to him,
especially when he knew that while he was away they would be carting
dung onto the fields not ploughed ready for it, and heaping it all up
anyhow; and would not screw the shares in the ploughs, but would let
them come off and then say that the new ploughs were a silly inven-
tion, and there was nothing like the old Andreevna plough, and so on.
“Come, you’ve done enough trudging about in the heat,” Sergey
Ivanovitch would say to him.
“No, I must just run round to the counting-house for a minute,”
Levin would answer, and he would run off to the fields.
Chapter 2.
Early in June it happened that Agafea Mihalovna, the old nurse
and housekeeper, in carrying to the cellar a jar of mushrooms she had
just pickled, slipped, fell, and sprained her wrist. The district doctor, a
talkative young medical student, who had just finished his studies,
came to see her. He examined the wrist, said it was not broken, was
delighted at a chance of talking to the celebrated Sergey Ivanovitch
Koznishev, and to show his advanced views of things told him all the
scandal of the district, complaining of the poor state into which the
district council had fallen. Sergey Ivanovitch listened attentively, asked
him questions, and, roused by a new listener, he talked fluently, uttered
a few keen and weighty observations, respectfully appreciated by the
young doctor, and was soon in that eager frame of mind his brother
knew so well, which always, with him, followed a brilliant and eager
conversation. After the departure of the doctor, he wanted to go with a
fishing rod to the river. Sergey Ivanovitch was fond of angling, and was,
it seemed, proud of being able to care for such a stupid occupation.
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