Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/105

Rh cleaned out in my life. Why, I have driven here with hired horses! Do just take a look at them!'

Hereupon he bent Tchitchikov's head down so that the latter almost knocked it against the window frame.

'Do you see what wretched hacks they are? They could scarcely crawl here, the damned brutes; I had to get into his chaise.'

Saying this Nozdryov pointed to his companion.

'You are acquainted, are you? My brother-in-law, Mizhuev! We have been talking about you all the morning. "You see now," I said, "if we don't meet Tchitchikov." Well, old man, if only you knew how I have been fleeced! Would you believe it, I have not only dropped my four fast trotters, I have got rid of every mortal thing. Why, I have no watch or chain left.'

Tchitchikov glanced at him, and saw that he was in fact wearing neither watch nor chain. He even fancied that one of his whiskers was shorter and not so thick as the other.

'But if I had only twenty roubles in my pocket,' Nozdryov went on, 'no more than twenty roubles, I would win it all back, and I'd not only win it all back, on my honour, I'd put thirty thousand in my pocket-book at once.'

'You said the same thing then, though,' retorted the fair man, 'but when I gave you fifty roubles, you lost them on the spot.'

'I should not have lost them, upon my soul, I shouldn't! If I hadn't done a silly thing, I shouldn't! If I hadn't laid two to one on that