Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/147

Rh honey posset is brewed for the chilly crowds in a market, jumped with gusto on to the shaft-horse who was almost bowed to the ground under his weight. 'Now it will be all right,' bawled the peasants. 'Make him smart, make him smart! Touch him up with the whip, that one yonder, the bay. Make him wriggle like a daddy-long-legs.' But seeing that no progress was made and that no whipping was any use. Uncle Mitya and Uncle Minyay both mounted the shaft-horse while Andryushka got on to the trace-horse. At last the coachman, losing patience, drove both uncles away; and it was as well that he did, for the horses were in a steam as though they had raced from one posting station to another without taking breath. He gave them a minute to rest and then they set off of themselves. While all this was going on, Tchitchikov looked very attentively at the young lady in the carriage. Several times he made an effort to speak to her, but he somehow could not bring himself to do so. And meanwhile the ladies drove off, the pretty little head together with the delicate features and the slender waist vanished almost like a vision—and there remained only the road, the chaise, the three horses with whom the reader is familiar, Selifan, Tchitchikov, the desolate flatness of the surrounding fields. Everywhere in life, wherever it may be, among the coarse, cruelly poor, and dirtily squalid lower ranks, or among the monotonously frigid and tediously decorous higher orders—in every class a man is met at least once in his life by an apparition unlike