`Why is all this being done?' he thought. toms shoes `Why am I standing here, making them work? What are they all so busy for, trying to show their zeal before me? For what reason is old Matriona, my old friend, toiling? (I doctored her, when the beam fell on her in the fire),' he thought, looking at a thin old woman who was raking up the grain, moving painfully with her bare, sun-blackened feet over the uneven, rough floor. `Then she recovered, but today or tomorrow or in ten years she won't; they'll bury her, and nothing will be left either of her or of that dashing woman in the red skirt, who with that skillful, gentle action is shaking the ears out of their husks. They'll bury her, as well as this piebald gelding, and very soon too,' he thought, gazing at the heavily moving, panting horse that kept walking up the treadwheel that turned under him. `And they will bury her, and Fiodor the thresher with his curly beard full of chaff, and his shirt torn on his white shoulders - they will bury him. He's untying the sheaves, and giving orders, and shouting to the women, and quickly setting straight the strap on the moving wheel. And what's more, it's not them alone - they'll bury me too, and nothing will be left. What for? '
He thought this, and at the same time looked at his watch to reckon how much they threshed in an hour. He wanted to know this so as to judge by it the task to set for the day.
`It'll soon be one, and they're only beginning the third sheaf,' thought Levin. He went up to the man who was feeding the machine, and shouting over the roar of the machine, he told him to feed it more slowly.