1 Busy as ever with his farming.
2 It seemed to her that such principles could only be a hindrance in farm management.
3 Just now, since his disenchantment with farming, Levin was particularly glad to stay with Sviazhsky.
4 But Levin saw that he simply did so from a feeling of propriety, and that his farm was in a flourishing condition.
5 The business of reorganizing the farming of his land absorbed him as completely as though there would never be anything else in his life.
6 It was annoying to come upon that everlasting slovenliness in the farm work against which he had been striving with all his might for so many years.
7 The farming of the land, as he was managing it, had become not merely unattractive but revolting to him, and he could take no further interest in it.
8 Levin knew that his elder brother took little interest in farming, and only put the question in deference to him, and so he only told him about the sale of his wheat and money matters.
9 Next morning Konstantin Levin got up earlier than usual, but he was detained giving directions on the farm, and when he reached the mowing grass the mowers were already at their second row.
10 Now he was glad to get away from the neighborhood of the Shtcherbatskys, and still more from his farm work, especially on a shooting expedition, which always in trouble served as the best consolation.
11 While they were saddling his horse, Levin again called up the bailiff, who was hanging about in sight, to make it up with him, and began talking to him about the spring operations before them, and his plans for the farm.
12 At first Levin had thought of giving up the whole farming of the land just as it was to the peasants, the laborers, and the bailiff on new conditions of partnership; but he was very soon convinced that this was impossible, and determined to divide it up.
13 And, as he came out into the farmyard, Levin, like a tree in spring that knows not what form will be taken by the young shoots and twigs imprisoned in its swelling buds, hardly knew what undertakings he was going to begin upon now in the farm work that was so dear to him.
14 Levin put on his big boots, and, for the first time, a cloth jacket, instead of his fur cloak, and went out to look after his farm, stepping over streams of water that flashed in the sunshine and dazzled his eyes, and treading one minute on ice and the next into sticky mud.
15 In the early morning he rode over to the first sowing of the rye, and to the oats, which were being carried to the stacks, and returning home at the time his wife and sister-in-law were getting up, he drank coffee with them and walked to the farm, where a new thrashing machine was to be set working to get ready the seed-corn.