Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/16

4 fashionable cut-away tails and a shirt-front fastened with a Tula breastpin adorned with a bronze pistol. The young man turned round, stared at the chaise, holding his cap which was almost flying off in the wind, and went on his way.

When the chaise drove into the yard the gentleman was met by a hotel servant—waiter as they are called in the restaurants—a fellow so brisk and rapid in his movements that it was impossible to distinguish his countenance. He ran out nimbly with a dinner napkin in his hand, a long figure wearing a long frock-coat made of some cotton mixture with the waist almost up to the nape of his neck, tossed his locks and nimbly led the gentleman upstairs along the whole length of a wooden gallery to show the guest to the room Providence had sent him. The room was of the familiar type, but the hotel, too, was of the familiar type—that is, it was precisely like the hotels in provincial towns where for two roubles a day travellers get a quiet room with black beetles peeping out of every corner like prunes, and a door, always barricaded with a chest of drawers, into the next apartment, of which the occupant, a quiet and taciturn but excessively inquisitive person, is interested in finding out every detail relating to the new-comer. The outer façade of the hotel corresponded with its internal peculiarities: it was a very long building of two storeys; the lower storey had not been stuccoed but left dark-red brick, which had become darker still from the violent changes of the weather, and also