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 warm air, freshened by the snow as he rode through the forest where the snow still lay here and there rapidly melting in the tracks, he took keen delight in every one of his trees, with greening moss and swelling buds. As he came out from the forest, before him lay a vast stretch of fields; they seemed like an immense carpet of velvet where there was not a bare spot or a marsh, only here and there in the hollows marked with patches of melting snow. The sight of a peasant's mare and colt treading down his fields did not anger him, but he ordered a passing muzhik to drive them out. With the same gentleness he received the sarcastic and impudent answer of the muzhik Ipat, whom he met and asked, "Ipat, shall we put in the seed before very long?" And Ipat replied, "We must plow first, Konstantin Dmitritch."

The farther he went, the more his good-humor increased, and each of his plans for improving his estate seemed to surpass the other: to protect the fields on the south by lines of trees so as to prevent the snow from staying too long; to divide his arable fields into nine parts, six of which should be well dressed, and the other three sown down to grass; to build a cow-yard in the farthest corner of one field, and have a pond dug; to have portable inclosures for the cattle, so as to utilize the manure; and thus to cultivate three hundred desyatins of wheat, a hundred desyatins of potatoes, and one hundred and fifty of clover, without exhausting the soil.

Full of these reflections, he picked his way carefully along so as not to tread down his fields, till at last he reached the place where the laborers were sowing the clover. The cart, loaded with seed, instead of being left on the edge of the field, had been driven into the plowed land, and his winter wheat was crushed by the wheels and trampled down by the horse. The two laborers were sitting by the edge of the field, evidently smoking a mutual pipe. The earth in the cart, mixed together with the seed, had not been worked over, but was full of hard or frozen lumps.