It was a long time ago, in that life that "will not return forever." The narrator walked along a high road, and in front, in a small birch grove, men mowed grass and sang.

The narrator was surrounded by the fields of "central, primordial Russia."

It seemed that no, and never had, neither time, nor dividing it into centuries, into years in this forgotten - or blessed - god of the country.

The mowers traveled from afar “along our Oryol places” to even more fertile steppes, helping to cope with abundant haymaking along the way. They were friendly, carefree and "eager to work." They differed from the local mowers in their dialect, customs and clothing.

A week ago, they mowed in the forest near the narrator’s estate. Passing by, he saw how the mowers "went to work" - drank spring water, stood in a row and let the braids in a wide semicircle. When the narrator returned, the piglets had dinner. He noticed that they were eating “mushrooms-fly agarics, terrible with their dope”, cooked in a pot. The narrator was horrified, and the scythes, laughing, said: “Nothing, they are sweet, clean chicken!”

Now they were singing, and the narrator was listening and could not understand, "what is such a wondrous charm of their song." The charm was in the consanguinity that the narrator felt between himself and these simple braids, common with their surrounding nature.

And even that was ...the charm that this homeland, this common home of ours was Russia, and that only her soul could sing like the scythes sang in this birch forest that responded to their every breath.

Singing was like a single sigh of a strong young chest. So directly and easily sung only in Russia. The pigs walked, without the slightest effort, “revealing glades in front of them” and breathed out a song in which “they parted with their beloved one”, yearned and said goodbye to death, but still did not believe “in this hopelessness”. They knew that there would be no real separation as long as “native sky, and infinite Russia around”, spacious, free and full of fabulous riches above them.

A good fellow cried in a song, and his native land stood up for him, his animals and birds helped him out, he received airplane carpets and invisible hats, milk rivers flowed for him and self-assembled tablecloths unfold. He flew out of the dungeon with a clear falcon, and the thick wilds hid him from enemies.

And there was also in this song what the narrator and the scythes felt: endless happiness. These distant days have passed, because nothing lasts forever, "The ancient intercessors abandoned their children ... they were scolded by prayers and spells, Mother Earth-Dry Earth was withered." The end has come, "the limit of God's forgiveness."