Page:Dead Souls - A Poem by Nikolay Gogol - vol2.djvu/189

Rh one day!' thought Tchitchikov. A buxom wife and little Tchitchikovs rose before his imagination again. Whose heart would not have been warmed by such an evening!

At supper they over-ate themselves again. When Pavel Ivanovitch had retired to the room assigned to him, and had got into bed he felt his stomach: 'It's as tight as a drum!' he said; 'no mayor could possibly get in.' As luck would have it, his host's room was the other side of the wall, the wall was a thin one and everything that was said was audible. On the pretence of an early lunch he was giving the cook directions for a regular dinner, and what directions! It was enough to give a dead man an appetite. He licked and smacked his lips. There were continually such phrases as: 'But roast it well, let it soak well.' While the cook kept saying in a thin high voice: 'Yes sir, I can, I can do that too.'

'And make a four-cornered fish pasty; in one corner put a sturgeon's cheeks and the jelly from its back, in another put buckwheat mush, mushrooms and onions and sweet roe, and brains and something else—you know …'

'Yes sir, I can do it like that.'

'And let it be just a little coloured on one side, you know, and let it be a little less done on the other. And bake the underpart, you understand, that it may be all crumbling, all soaked in juice, so that it will melt in the mouth like snow.'