Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/217

Rh stream, and my head be wreathed with holy terror and brilliance, and men will hear with a confused tremor the majestic thunder of other words. …

But forward! forward! Away with the wrinkles that furrow the brow, away with stern and gloomy looks! Let us plunge at once into life with all its silent clamour and jingling bells, and let us see what Tchitchikov is doing.

Tchitchikov woke up, stretched his arms and legs and felt that he had had a good sleep. After lying for two minutes on his back, he snapped his fingers, and with a beaming face remembered that he had now almost four hundred souls. He jumped out of bed on the spot and did not even look at his face, of which he was very fond, finding, so it appears, the chin extremely attractive, for he very often praised it to some one of his friends, especially if one happened to be present while he was shaving. 'Just look,' he would say, stroking it with his hand, 'what a chin I have: perfectly round.' On this occasion, however, he looked neither at his chin nor at his face, but, just as he was, put on his dressing-gown and his morocco boots with decorated tops of many colours (the sort of boots in which the town of Torzhok does a brisk trade, thanks to the Russians' love of comfort), and forgetting his dignity and his decorous middle age, he pranced like a Scotchman, in nothing but his shirt, right across the room in two skips, very neatly striking himself on the back with his heels. Then he instantly