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THE CHAIRS AND A HOSTEL

tatistics know everything and there is no getting away from them. They not only know how many dentists, porters, film-producers, bicycles, monuments, and sewing-machines there are in the country, but they even know the number of statisticians it contains.

There is one thing, however, they do not know. They do not know how many chairs there are in Soviet Russia.

There are a great number of chairs in Russia. The last census showed that the population of the several republics in Russia numbered one hundred and forty-three million people. If we exclude the ninety million peasants who prefer to sit on stoves and benches, or those in the East who sit on carpets and rugs, even then there are fifty-three million people to whom chairs are a first necessity of life.

If we take into account the mistakes which may have been made in taking the census and the habit of certain citizens to sit between two chairs, then taking two as the average number of chairs per head we find that there must be at least twenty-six and a half million chairs in the country. To be on the safe side, let us ignore the six and a half million and we see that the minimum is twenty million chairs.

In this ocean of chairs made of walnut, oak, and ash, of mahogany and carelian birch wood, of pine and fir, the heroes of our novel have to find one walnut chair