the wild swans and geese flew high in the air, with their calls of spring. The cattle, with rough hair and spots worn bare, lowed as they went out to pasture; the bandy-legged lambs gamboled around the bleating ewes, soon to lose their wool; swift-footed children ran barefoot over the wet paths, where their footprints were left like fossils; the peasant-women gossiped gayly around the edge of the pond, where they were bleaching their linen; and in the yards resounded the axes of the muzhiks, repairing their plows and their wagons.
Spring had really come.
CHAPTER XIII
Levin put on his heavy boots, and, for the first time, his sleeveless cloth coat instead of his fur shuba, and went out to look over his estate, tramping through the brooklets which dazzled his eyes as they glanced in the sun, and stepping, now on a cake of ice, and now in sticky mud.
Spring is the epoch of plans and projects. Levin, as he went out into his court, no more definitely knew what he would first take in hand in his beloved farming than the tree in early spring knows how and why his young sprouts and branches grow out from their enveloping buds; but he felt that he was going to originate the most charming projects and the most sensible plans.
He went first to see his cattle. The cows had been let out into the yard, and with their smooth new coats of hair glistening as they warmed themselves in the sun, they were lowing as if to beg permission to go out to pasture. Levin knew them all, even to the minutest particulars. He contemplated them with satisfaction, and gave orders to take them to pasture, and to let the calves out into the yard. The cow-boy gayly started to drive them out into the field. The milkmaids, gathering up their petticoats, and splashing through the mud with bare feet, white as yet, and free from tan, chased the bellowing calves, silly with the rapture of spring, and with switches kept them from escaping from the yard.
