places
there was more and more earnestness in Laska's exploration. A
little marsh bird did not divert her attention for more than an
instant. She made one circuit round the clump of reeds, was
beginning a second, and suddenly quivered with excitement and
became motionless.

"Come, come, Stiva!" shouted Levin, feeling his heart beginning
to beat more violently; and all of a sudden, as though some sort
of shutter had been drawn back from his straining ears, all
sounds, confused but loud, began to beat on his hearing, losing
all sense of distance. He heard the steps of Stepan
Arkadyevitch, mistaking them for the tramp of the horses in the
distance; he heard the brittle sound of the twigs on which he had
trodden, taking this sound for the flying of a grouse. He heard
too, not far behind him, a splashing in the water, which he could
not explain to himself.

Picking his steps, he moved up to the dog.

"Fetch it!"

Not a grouse but a snipe flew up from beside the dog. Levin had
lifted his gun, but at the very instant when he was taking aim,
the sound of splashing grew louder, came closer, and was joined
with the sound of Veslovsky's voice, shouting something with
strange loudness. Levin saw he had his gun pointed behind the
snipe, but still he fired.

When he had made sure he had missed, Levin looked round and saw
the horses and the wagonette not on the road but in the marsh.

Veslovsky, eager to see the shooting, had driven into the marsh,
and got the horses stuck in the mud.

"Damn the fellow!" Levin said to himself, as he went back to the
carriage that had sunk in the mire. "What did you drive in for?"
he said to him dryly, and calling the coachman, he began pulling
the horses out.

Levin was vexed both at being hindered from shooting and at his
horses getting stuck in the mud, and still more at the fact that
neither Stepan Arkadyevitch nor Veslovsky helped him and the
coachman to unharness the horses and get them out, since neither
of them had the slightest notion of harnessing. Without
vouchsafing a syllable in reply to Vassenka's protestations that
it had been quite dry there, Levin worked in silence with the
coachman at extricating the horses. But then, as he got warm at
the work and saw how assiduously Veslovsky was tugging at the
wagonette by one of the mud-guards, so that he broke it indeed,
Levin blamed himself for having under the influence of
yesterday's feelings been too cold to Veslovsky,