Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol1.djvu/35

Rh respect, though a Russian, prefers to be as precise as a German. This however will not take up much time and space, since we need not add much to what the reader knows already, that is, that Petrushka wore a rather roomy brown coat that had been his master's, and had, as usual with persons of his calling, a thick nose and lips. He was rather of a taciturn than of a talkative disposition; he even had a generous yearning for enlightenment, that is, for reading books, over the subject of which he did not trouble himself: it was precisely the same to him whether it was the story of a love-sick hero's adventures, or simply a dictionary or a prayer-book—he read everything with equal attention. If he had been offered a manual of chemistry he would not have refused it. He liked not so much what he read as the reading itself, or rather the process of reading, the fact that the letters continually made up a word and the devil knows what it might sometimes mean. His reading was for the most part done in a recumbent position on the bedstead in the passage and on a mattress which had through this habit been flattened out as thin as a wafer. Apart from his passion for reading he had two other characteristics; he slept without undressing, just as he was, in the same coat, and he always brought with him his own peculiar atmosphere, his individual odour which was suggestive of a room which has been lived in a long time, so that it was enough for him to put up his bedstead somewhere even in a room hitherto uninhabited, and to instal there