It was June, and the weather was hot and still. In the forest the foliage was thick, sappy and green, and only rarely did a yellow leaf fall here and there from a birch or a lime-tree. The wild-rose bushes were covered with sweet blossoms; and the forest glades were a mass of honey-scented clover. The thick, tall and waving rye was growing darker, and its grain was swelling fast. In the low-lying land the corncrakes called to one another; in the rye and the oat field quails croaked and cried noisily; in the forests at rare intervals the nightingales sang a few notes and then were again silent. The heat was dry and scorching, and the dust lay an inch thick on the road, or rose in dense clouds, blown now to left and now to right by a stray gentle breeze.
The peasants were working to finish their buildings or were carting manure. The hungry cattle were out on the dry fallow land, awaiting the aftermath in the hayfields. The cows and calves were lowing, and, with uplifted hooked tails, abandoned their shady resting-places to scamper away from the herdsmen. By the roadside and on the banks, lads were pasturing horses; women were carrying sacks of grass out of the woods; young maidens and little girls, hurrying after one another, crept between the bushes where the trees were felled, picking strawberries to sell to the gentlefolk who had come to the country for the summer.
These summer inhabitants of ornamented, architecturally pretentious bungalows, strolled with open sunshades, in light, clean, costly clothes, along sand-strewn paths; or sat in the shade of trees and arbours, by decorated tables, and, overpowered by the heat, drank tea or sipped cooling drinks.
Before the splendid bungalow of Nicholas Semyónovitch, with its tower, veranda, little balconies and galleries (everything about it fresh, new, and