nt laugh was audible in the
audience. Either from the pain or perhaps from shame at his awkwardness
the soldier flushed a dark red.

After the customary questions to the prisoner, the shuffling of the
jury, the calling over and swearing in of the witnesses, the reading
of the charge began. The narrow-chested, pale-faced secretary, far
too thin for his uniform, and with sticking plaster on his check,
read it in a low, thick bass, rapidly like a sacristan, without
raising or dropping his voice, as though afraid of exerting his
lungs; he was seconded by the ventilation wheel whirring indefatigably
behind the judge's table, and the result was a sound that gave a
drowsy, narcotic character to the stillness of the hall.

The president, a short-sighted man, not old but with an extremely
exhausted face, sat in his armchair without stirring and held his
open hand near his brow as though screening his eyes from the sun.
To the droning of the ventilation wheel and the secretary he
meditated. When the secretary paused for an instant to take breath
on beginning a new page, he suddenly started and looked round at
the court with lustreless eyes, then bent down to the ear of the
judge next to him and asked with a sigh:

"Are you putting up at Demyanov's, Matvey Petrovitch?"

"Yes, at Demyanov's," answered the other, starting too.

"Next time I shall probably put up there too. It's really impossible
to put up at Tipyakov's! There's noise and uproar all night! Knocking,
coughing, children crying. . . . It's impossible!"

The assistant prosecutor, a fat, well-nourished, dark man with gold
spectacles, with a handsome, well-groomed beard, sat motionless as
a statue, with his cheek propped on his fist, reading Byron's "Cain."
His eyes were full of eager attention and his eyebrows rose higher
and higher with wonder. . . . From time to time he dropped back in
his chair, gazed without interest straight before him for a minute,
and then buried himself in his reading again. The council for the
defence moved the blunt end of his pencil about the table and mused
with his head on one side. . . . His youthful face expressed nothing
but the frigid, immovable boredom which is commonly seen on the
face of schoolboys and men on duty who are forced from day to day
to sit in the same place, to see the same faces, the same walls.
He felt no excitement about the speech he was to make, and indeed
what did that speech amount to? On instructions from his