Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/306

294 walked into the room. The ladies vied with each other in explaining the whole episode, they told him of the purchase of the dead souls, and of the plot to carry off the governor's daughter, and completely bewildered him, so that in spite of his standing on the same spot winking with his left eye, and flicking his beard with his handkerchief to brush off some snuff from it, he was utterly unable to make head or tail of it. And so the two ladies left him standing and went each on her way to rouse the town. They succeeded in carrying out this enterprise in a little over half an hour. The town certainly was roused; everything was in a ferment and no one knew what to think. The ladies succeeded in throwing such a mist over the eyes of every one, that all, and especially the officials, were for a time completely overwhelmed. They found themselves for the first moment in the position of a schoolboy whose schoolfellows have thrust a twist of paper full of snuff up his nose while he is asleep. Breathing up all the snuff with the energy of sleep, he wakes and jumps up, looks about him like an idiot with his eyes starting out of his head and cannot grasp where he is, what has happened to him, and then recognises the walls lighted up by the slanting rays of the sun, the laughter of his companions hiding in the corners, and glancing out of window, sees the early morning with the awakening forest resounding with the notes of a thousand birds, and the shining river, lost here and there in gleaming zigzags among the slender reeds, and dotted