Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol2.djvu/137

Rh doubt would deal with learned or scientific subjects.

The visitor, however, touched rather upon the incidents of the inner world. He spoke of the mutability of destiny, compared his life to a ship in mid-ocean, driven before the winds; referred to the fact that he had frequently had to change his appointments and his duties, that he had suffered a great deal in the cause of justice, that his life even had more than once been in danger from his enemies, and he said a great deal more from which Tyentyetnikov could gather that his visitor was rather a practical man. In conclusion he brought out a white cambric handkerchief and blew his nose more loudly than Andrey Ivanovitch had ever heard any one do. Sometimes in an orchestra there is a rascally trumpet which, when it gives a blast, seems to be blaring right in one's ear: such was the sound which echoed through the awakened rooms of the slumbering house, and it was immediately followed by an agreeable fragrance of eau-de-Cologne, invisibly diffused by the deft flourish of the cambric pocket-handkerchief.

The reader will have perhaps guessed already that the visitor was no other than our honoured and long-deserted Pavel Ivanovitch Tchitchikov. He was a little older; evidently this interval had not been free from storms and agitations. It seemed as though even the coat he wore were rather older, and the chaise, and the coachman and the groom and the horses, and the harness seemed as though