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 Now at last the attorney comprehended that the clerk had taken them, but why-for what possible purpose! And curiosity overpowering his obligatory official wrath, the counsellor impatiently exploded.

“What did you intend to do with them, Konopásek?”

“Supper an evening meal, your bonor!” stuttered Konopásek. “It is Christmas day. I haven’t even a sixpence. I promised my wife I’d bring some wafers she wanted to bake them with shreds of fat. I have six children and I must make some sort of Christmas for them. They haven’t eaten all day-there was nothing in the house—.”

The counsellor slid the spectacles down from his forehead to his eyes, gazed at the pile of white, tasteless, unsalted, starchy wafers and then he meant to look at Konopásek, but suddenly his glance shifted from the miserable, twitching face with its blue lips on which trembled the gray streaked moustache and fixing his eyes on the clerk’s faded, stained necktie, he asked, “Have you ever eaten them before, Konopásek?”

“Yes, sir,” uttered the quivering lips of the clerk.

“Is the tuff really eatable?” asked the amazed attorney.

“Indeed, yes, Mr. Counsellor. Dear Lord, if one only had enough of them—."

“Put them back into the boxes!” commanded the counsellor in a voice bristling suddenly as he turned to his own desk.

The clerk raked the wafers with his thin, ink-spotted