dinary effort, and showing an endurance, which are quite unknown in the ordinary conditions of their lives, and which would be prized very highly if it were not repeated every year, and did not produce such very simple results. Mowing and sowing rye and oats, reaping, harvesting, threshing, — these are labors which seem simple and commonplace; but to accomplish them in the short time accorded by nature, every one, old and young, must set to work. For three or four weeks they must be content with the simplest fare, — black bread, garlic, and kvas; must sleep only a few hours, and must not pause night or day. And every year this happens throughout all Russia.
Having lived the larger part of his life in the country, and in the closest relations with the peasantry, Levin always at harvest-time felt that this universal activity among the people embraced his own life.
In the early morning he had gone to the field of early rye, to the field where they were carrying off the oats in ricks. Then he came back to breakfast with his wife and sister-in-law, and had afterward gone off on foot to the farm, where he was trying a new threshing-machine.
This whole day. Levin, as he talked with the overseer and the muzhiks in the field, as he talked at the house with his wife and Dolly and the children and his father-in-law, thought of only one thing; and constantly the same questions pursued him: "What am I? and where am I? and why am I here?"
As he stood in the cool shadow of his newly thatched barn, where the hazelwood timbers, still smelling of the fragrant leaves, held down the straw to the freshly peeled aspen timbers that made the roof, Levin gazed, now through the open doors, where whirled and played the dry and choking dust thrown off by the threshing-machine; now at the hot sunlight lying on the grass of the threshing-floor, and at the fresh straw just brought out of the barn; now at the white-breasted swallows with their spotted heads, as they flew about twittering, and settled under the eaves, or, shaking their wings, darted through the open doors; and then again at the
