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 tell: especially interesting to Levin was the tidings that his brother Sergyeï Ivanovitch expected to come into the country this summer; but not one word did Stepan Arkadyevitch say about Kitty or any of the Shcherbatskys, he simply transmitted his wife's greeting. Levin was grateful to him for this delicacy. As usual, he had stored up during his hours of solitude a throng of ideas and impressions which he could not share with any of his domestics, and now he poured into Oblonsky's ears his poetical spring joys, his failures and plans and farming projects, his thoughts and his observations on the books which he had read, and above all the idea of his treatise, the scheme of which consisted—though he himself had not noticed it—of a critique on all former works on farming.

Stepan Arkadyevitch, amiable, and always ready to grasp a point, showed unusual cordiality; and Levin even thought that he noticed a certain flattering consideration and an undertone of tenderness in his treatment of him.

The efforts of Agafya Mikhaïlovna and the cook to get up an especially good dinner resulted in the two friends, who were half starved, betaking themselves to the zakuska, or lunch-table, and devouring bread and butter, cold chicken and salted mushrooms, and finally in Levin calling for the soup without the little pasties which the cook had made in the hope of surprising the guest.

But Stepan Arkadyevitch, though he was used to different kinds of dinners, found everything excellent, the travnik, or herb-beer, the bread, the butter, and especially the cold chicken, the mushrooms, the shchi, or cabbage-soup, the fowl with white sauce, and the white Krimean wine,—everything was admirable, wonderful!

"Perfect! perfect!" he cried, as he lit a big cigarette after the roast. "I feel as if I had escaped the shocks and noise of a ship, and had landed on a peaceful shore. And so you say that the element represented by the working-man ought to be studied above all others, and be taken as a guide in the choice of economy expe-