Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/308

296 for dead souls? There is positively no reason for it. It's all fiddlesticks, nonsense rhymes, soft-boiled boots! It's simply the deuce! …' In short, the discussions were endless, and all the town was talking of dead souls and the governor's daughter, of Tchitchikov and dead souls, of the governor's daughter and Tchitchikov, and everything was in a stir. The town that till then had been wrapped in slumber was boiling like a whirlpool. All the sluggards and lazybones who had been for years lounging at home in dressing-gowns, abusing the shoemaker for making their boots too narrow, or the tailor or the drunken coachman, crept out of their holes; all who had dropped all their acquaintances years ago and whose only friends, to use the popular expression, were Mr. Slugabed and Mr. Sleepyhead (characters as well known all over Russia as the phrase, 'visiting Mr. Snooze and Mr. Snore,' which signifies to sleep like the dead on the side, or the back, or in any other position to the accompaniment of snoring, wheezing and so on); all those who could not have been lured out of their houses even by an invitation to taste a fish soup costing five hundred roubles, with sturgeon six feet long, and all sorts of fish-pasties which melt in the mouth, turned out now; in fact it seemed as though the town were busy and important and very well populated. A Sysoy Pafnutevitch and a Makdonald Karlovitch who had never been heard of before appeared in public. A long lanky gentleman with his arm in a sling, taller than