It was the time of the year, the very top of the summer, when the prospects of harvest may be estimated, when the labors of the next year's planting begin to be thought of, and the mowing-time has come; when the rye is already eared and sea-green in color, but still not fully formed; when the ears of corn swing lightly in the breeze; when the green oats, with scattered clumps of yellow grass, peep irregularly from the late-sown fields; when the early buckwheat already is up and hides the soil; when the fallow fields, beaten as hard as stone by the cattle and with paths deserted, on which the sokha, or primitive plow, has no effect, are half broken up; when the odor of the dry manure, heaped in little hillocks over the fields, mingles at twilight with the perfume of the "honey-grass," [1] and on the bottom lands, waiting for the scythe, stand the protected meadows like a boundless sea with the darkening clumps of sorrel that has done blooming.
It was the time when there is a brief breathing-spell before the harvest, that great event which the muzhik with eagerness expects each year. The crops promised to be superb; and there was a succession of bright, clear summer days, followed by short, dewy nights.
The two brothers had to go through the woodland to reach the fields. Sergyeï Ivanovitch was all the time admiring the beauty of the forest with its dense canopy of leaves, and he pointed out to his brother, as they rode along, now an old linden almost in flower, dark on its shady side and variegated with yellow stipules; now at the emerald-shining young shoots of that same year; but Konstantin did not himself like to speak or to hear about the beauties of nature. Words, he thought, spoiled the beauty of the thing that he saw. He assented to what his brother said, but allowed his mind to concern itself with other things. After they left the wood, his whole attention was absorbed by a fallow field on a hillock, where in some places the grass was growing yellow, where in others whole squares of it had been cut, and in others raked up into haycocks, and where in
- ↑ Holeus mollis, soft-grass.
