Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/314

302 'beak broken off' as the combatants expressed it, that is, his nose so completely smashed, that there was not more than a half finger's breadth left on his face. At their trial the merchants pleaded guilty, explaining that they had had just a drop. There were rumours that while on their trial they had offered four imperial notes each to the judges. The case was very obscure, however; from the inquiry and the report that was made, it appeared that the merchants had been suffocated by charcoal fumes and as such they were buried. The other event, which had taken place only recently, was as follows: the Crown peasants of the village of Vshivaya-Spyess in conjunction with the Crown peasants of the village of Borovka, otherwise Zadirailovo, were accused of having made away with the rural police in the shape of one Drobyazhkin, a tax assessor; it was said that the rural police, that is Drobyazhkin, had taken to visiting their village with excessive frequency, which in some cases is as bad as a pestilence, and the reason of his doing so was that the 'rural police,' having a weakness for the fair sex, ran after the village girls and women. This was not known for certain, however, though in their evidence the peasants plainly stated that the 'rural police' was as wanton as a tom-cat, and that they had lain in wait for him more than once and on one occasion had kicked him stark naked out of a hut where he lay hidden. The 'rural police,' of course, did deserve to be punished for his amatory propensities. But the peasants of