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DIAMONDS TO SIT ON

The chair ! shouted Bender. ‘ Pussy ' it’s our chair! ’ K friends rowed up to the chair. ±Itl was wa.s bobbing up and down in the water and was steadily floating away from their boat. The water was lapping its s^es. This was the chair they had thrown over­ board, and it was slowly wending its way towards the Caspian Sea. ‘ Hallo, my old friend ! Why, we haven’t seen each other for many a day! You know. Pussy, this chair reminds me of our own life, for we too are floating ■ down with the current. We sink, we come up agam, although no one is excited about it. Nobody loves us. Not a soul worries about us, and if the chess amateurs had managed to drown us yesterday there would have been nothing but an inquest held. “ Both bodies were lying with their feet south-east and their heads north-west. There were several wounds on the bodies, evidently inflicted by some blunt instrument ” certainly have beaten us with their chess-boards, and there’s no need to tell you that a chess-board is a very blunt instrument “ The first corpse was of a man of fifty-five, dressed in a tom coat, a shabby pair of trousers, and old boots. In one 01 the pockets there was an identification certificate in the name of Konrad Karlovich Michaelson.” Yes Pussy, that s all they’d say about you.’ 1 what would they have to say about you ? ’ asked Hippolyte glumly. ‘ something quite different about me. lhe second corpse was of a man aged about twenty-seven. He had loved and suffered: he had loved money and suffered from the lack of it. His face, with a noble forehead and a mop of curly black dTd towards the sun. His beautiful feet. Clad m boots size seven, were stretched towards the aurora borealis His body was enveloped in pure white underclothes and on his heart lay a golden harp