f his hotel-room into the passage, and in a cracked voice
cried: "Semyon! Waiter!"

And looking at his frightened face one might have supposed that the
ceiling had fallen in on him or that he had just seen a ghost in
his room.

"Upon my word, Semyon!" he cried, seeing the attendant running
towards him. "What is the meaning of it? I am a rheumatic, delicate
man and you make me go barefoot! Why is it you don't give me my
boots all this time? Where are they?"

Semyon went into Murkin's room, looked at the place where he was
in the habit of putting the boots he had cleaned, and scratched his
head: the boots were not there.

"Where can they be, the damned things?" Semyon brought out. "I fancy
I cleaned them in the evening and put them here. . . . H'm! . . .
Yesterday, I must own, I had a drop. . . . I must have put them in
another room, I suppose. That must be it, Afanasy Yegoritch, they
are in another room! There are lots of boots, and how the devil is
one to know them apart when one is drunk and does not know what one
is doing? . . . I must have taken them in to the lady that's next
door . . . the actress. . . ."

"And now, if you please, I am to go in to a lady and disturb her
all through you! Here, if you please, through this foolishness I
am to wake up a respectable woman."

Sighing and coughing, Murkin went to the door of the next room and
cautiously tapped.

"Who's there?" he heard a woman's voice a minute later.

"It's I!" Murkin began in a plaintive voice, standing in the attitude
of a cavalier addressing a lady of the highest society. "Pardon my
disturbing you, madam, but I am a man in delicate health, rheumatic
. . . . The doctors, madam, have ordered me to keep my feet warm,
especially as I have to go at once to tune the piano at Madame la
Generale Shevelitsyn's. I can't go to her barefoot."

"But what do you want? What piano?"

"Not a piano, madam; it is in reference to boots! Semyon, stupid
fellow, cleaned my boots and put them by mistake in your room. Be
so extremely kind, madam, as to give me my boots!"

There was a sound of rustling, of jumping off the bed and the
flapping of slippers, after which the door opened slightly and a
plump feminine hand flung at Murkin's feet a pair of boots. The
piano-tuner thanked her and went into his own room.

"Odd . . ." he muttered, putting on the boots, "it seems as though
this is not the right boot. Why, here are two left boots! Both are
for the left foot