Anna Karenina

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 in ear, though its
ears are still light, not yet full, and it waves in gray-green billows in the
wind; when the green oats, with tufts of yellow grass scattered here and
there among it, droop irregularly over the late-sown fields; when the early
buckwheat is already out and hiding the ground; when the fallow lands,
trodden hard as stone by the cattle, are half ploughed over, with paths left
untouched by the plough; when from the dry dung-heaps carted onto the
fields there comes at sunset a smell of manure mixed with meadow-sweet,
and on the low-lying lands the riverside meadows are a thick sea of grass
waiting for the mowing, with blackened heaps of the stalks of sorrel among
it.
Chapter 2
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It was the time when there comes a brief pause in the toil of the fields
before the beginning of the labors of harvest--every year recurring, every
year straining every nerve of the peasants. The crop was a splendid one,
and bright, hot summer days had set in with short, dewy nights.
The brothers had to drive through the woods to reach the meadows. Sergey
Ivanovitch was all the while admiring the beauty of the woods, which were
a tangled mass of leaves, pointing out to his brother now an old lime tree on
the point of flowering, dark on the shady side, and brightly spotted with
yellow stipules, now the young shoots of this year's saplings brilliant with
emerald. Konstantin Levin did not like talking and hearing about the beauty
of nature. Words for him took away the beauty of what he saw. He assented
to what his brother said, but he could not help beginning to think of other
things. When they came out of the woods, all his attention was engrossed
by the view of the fallow land on the upland, in parts yellow with grass, in