Eleven stacks, or thirty-two loads

In mid-July the Elder from Levin's sister's village, fifteen miles off, reports that the hay is made and that he has already apportioned it and stacked eleven stacks of the landlord's share. Levin, who raised the price of the flooded meadows from seven roubles an acre to eight and after three years of resistance has the peasants taking a third of the hay in payment, hears something not quite square in the vague answers and rides over. Parmenich the old beekeeper welcomes him, talks freely about his swarms and evasively about the hay. Levin has a stack carted to the barn: thirty-two loads, not fifty. After long dispute the peasants keep the eleven stacks at the claimed count and the owner's share is measured afresh. Then he sits on a haycock marked with a willow branch and watches the meadow work — women in coloured dresses raking ridges, men forking cocks, carts going off under overhanging loads — and Parmenich's youngest son Vanka loading with his young wife, newly-awakened love plain in both faces.

Tolstoy puts the cheating and the idyll in one chapter and refuses to let either cancel the other: Levin proves the short measure, wins the dispute, and then sits down to envy the people he has just caught. Vanka and his wife loading a cart is the vision that will decide the next chapter, and it is made entirely of competent physical work.