ll white hands, with which he was turning over the papers before
him; then Skovorodnikoff, stout, massive and pock-marked, and a very
learned jurist, and finally, Be, the same partriarchal old man, who
was the last to arrive. Immediately behind the Senators came the Chief
Secretary and Associate Attorney General. He was a young man of medium
height, shaved, lean, with a very dark face and black, sad eyes.
Nekhludoff recognized him, notwithstanding his strange uniform and the
fact that he had not seen him for about six years, as one of his best
friends during his student life.

"Is the associate's name Selenin?" he asked the lawyer.

"Yes, why?"

"I know him very well; he is an excellent man----"

"And a good associate of the Attorney General--very sensible. It would
have been well to see him," said Fanirin.

"At all events, he will follow the dictates of his conscience," said
Nekhludoff, remembering his close relations with and friendship for
Selenin, and the latter's charming qualities of purity, honesty and
good breeding, in the best sense of the word.

The first case before the Senate was an appeal from the decision of
the Circuit Court of Appeals affirming a judgment in favor of the
publisher of a newspaper in a libel suit brought against him.

Nekhludoff listened and tried to understand the arguments in the
case, but as in the Circuit Court, the chief difficulty in
understanding what was going on was found in the fact that the
discussion centered not on what appeared naturally to be the main
point, but on side issues.

The libel consisted in an article accusing the president of a stock
company of swindling. It seemed, then, that the main point to consider
was, whether or not the president was guilty of swindling the
stockholders, and what was to be done to stop his swindling. But this
was never mentioned. The questions discussed were: Had the publisher
the legal right to print the article of its reporter? What crime has
he committed by printing it--defamation or libel? And does defamation
include libel, or libel defamation? And a number of other things
unintelligible to ordinary people, including various laws and
decisions of some "General Department."

The only thing Nekhludoff did understand was that, though Wolf had
sternly suggested but yesterday that the Senate could not consider the
substance of a case, in the case at bar he argued with evident
partiality in favor of reversing the judgment, and tha