“She bought her linseed unsifted, and sowed it unsifted too!” Then he stopped close to the barley, stunted, parched and scarce visible for the thistles, and camomile plants, and sorrels which grew there. “They have sown in too wet soil.—That swine! he has ruined the field! The rascal ought to have his neck twisted for tilling the land so. And how it has been harrowed! Dog-grass and couch-grass everywhere!” He was much displeased. But presently he came to a vast expanse of rye, waving in the sunshine, with heavy billowy ears of corn, sounding and rustling. This was a set-off: it had grown magnificently, the straw was thick in the stem, and the ears were full. “It grows like a forest of pines! Ah, that was Father’s sowing.... Even the Manor could show naught better!”—He plucked an ear, and rubbed it in his hands. The grain was full and fine, but soft as yet, liable to be ruined by a hailstorm. But where he stopped longest to admire and feast his eyes was over the wheat. The growth was not quite regular—in clumps here, in hollows there—but the ears were all glossy, darkish in hue, dense-growing, and large in size. “A first-rate crop! And, though on rising ground, it has suffered not at all from the drought.... ’Tis a harvest of pure gold!” On arriving at the boundary, he gazed back. Away by the churchyard they were mowing the clover, and the scythes moved flashing over the meadows, like gleams of lightning. On the fallows flocks of geese were feeding; men swarmed about like ants; and higher and farther still he could descry lonely houses, trees hunched up, gnarled and drooping over the roads; and again more and more vast lands fading into the distance, as into a flood of bluish trembling water. All was hushed in profound silence; the sultry air vibrated; it was, as it were, an atmosphere of white flame, through which a stork might be seen walking up and down, or poising itself on dropping wings; or a crow flying past, with beak wide open, gaping with the heat. On high there was but the intense dark azure, with a few white clouds straying across it. But below, the dry burning wind made sport: now whirling and staggering about like a drunken man; now starting up with a sudden loud whistle; or, again, lurking somewhere away out of sight, and then bursting out unexpectedly in the corn, which it teased and dashed to and fro, and drove hither and thither in lofty billows—to disappear again as suddenly, no one knew where, while the cornfields murmured in low voices, as if complaining of its rough behaviour. Antek, having reached his fallow at the skirt of the forest, had another burst of indignation. “Not yet ploughed up or manured! Our horses stand idle, the dung is wasted in heaps ... and what does it matter to him, the dirty scamp?—May all....” he swore fiercely, drawing nigh to the cross by the poplar road.