of things; that it was not he who was administering the estate; and would one way or another have eased his conscience, continuing to live far from his estates, and having the money sent him.  But now he decided that he could not leave things to go on as they were, but would have to alter them in a way unprofitable to himself, even though he had all these complicated and difficult relations with the prison world which made money necessary, as well as a probable journey to Siberia before him.  Therefore he decided not to farm the land, but to let it to the peasants at a low rent, to enable them to cultivate it without depending on a landlord.  More than once, when comparing the position of a landowner with that of an owner of serfs, Nekhludoff had compared the renting of land to the peasants instead of cultivating it with hired labour, to the old system by which serf proprietors used to exact a money payment from their serfs in place of labour.  It was not a solution of the problem, and yet a step towards the solution; it was a movement towards a less rude form of slavery.  And it was in this way he meant to act.

Nekhludoff reached Kousminski about noon.  Trying to simplify his life in every way, he did not telegraph, but hired a cart and pair at the station.  The driver was a young fellow in a nankeen coat, with a belt below his long waist.  He was glad to talk to the gentleman, especially because while they were talking his broken-winded white horse and the emaciated spavined one could go at a foot-pace, which they always liked to do.

The driver spoke about the steward at Kousminski without knowing that he was driving “the master.”  Nekhludoff had purposely not told him who he was.

“That ostentatious German,” said the driver (who had been to town and read novels) as he sat sideways on the box, passing his hand from the top to the bottom of his long whip, and trying to show off his accomplishments—­“that ostentatious German has procured three light bays, and when he drives out with his lady—–­oh, my!  At Christmas he had a Christmas-tree in the big house.  I drove some of the visitors there.  It had ’lectric lights; you could not see the like of it in the whole of the government.  What’s it to him, he has cribbed a heap of money.  I heard say he has bought an estate.”

Nekhludoff had imagined that he was quite indifferent to the way the steward managed his estate, and what advantages the steward derived from it.  The words of the long-waisted driver, however, were not pleasant to hear.

A dark cloud now and then covered the sun; the larks were soaring above the fields of winter corn; the forests were already covered with fresh young green; the meadows speckled with grazing cattle and horses.  The fields were being ploughed, and Nekhludoff enjoyed the lovely day.  But every now and then he had an unpleasant feeling, and, when he asked himself what it was caused by, he remembered what the driver had told him about the way the German was managing Kousminski.  When he got to his estate and set to work this unpleasant feeling vanished.