veyor began to
have twinges down his spine as though it were being rasped with a
cold file.

"Klimushka," he shouted. "Dear fellow! Where are you, Klimushka?"

For two hours the surveyor shouted, and it was only after he was
quite husky and had resigned himself to spending the night in the
forest that a faint breeze wafted the sound of a moan to him.

"Klim, is it you, dear fellow? Let us go on."

"You'll mu-ur-der me!"

"But I was joking, my dear man! I swear to God I was joking! As
though I had revolvers! I told a lie because I was frightened. For
goodness sake let us go on, I am freezing!"

Klim, probably reflecting that a real robber would have vanished
long ago with the horse and cart, came out of the forest and went
hesitatingly up to his passenger.

"Well, what were you frightened of, stupid? I . . . I was joking
and you were frightened. Get in!"

"God be with you, sir," Klim muttered as he clambered into the cart,
"if I had known I wouldn't have taken you for a hundred roubles. I
almost died of fright. . . ."

Klim lashed at the little mare. The cart swayed. Klim lashed once
more and the cart gave a lurch. After the fourth stroke of the whip
when the cart moved forward, the surveyor hid his ears in his collar
and sank into thought.

The road and Klim no longer seemed dangerous to him.

THE ORATOR

ONE fine morning the collegiate assessor, Kirill Ivanovitch Babilonov,
who had died of the two afflictions so widely spread in our country,
a bad wife and alcoholism, was being buried. As the funeral procession
set off from the church to the cemetery, one of the deceased's
colleagues, called Poplavsky, got into a cab and galloped off to
find a friend, one Grigory Petrovitch Zapoikin, a man who though
still young had acquired considerable popularity. Zapoikin, as many
of my readers are aware, possesses a rare talent for impromptu
speechifying at weddings, jubilees, and funerals. He can speak
whenever he likes: in his sleep, on an empty stomach, dead drunk
or in a high fever. His words flow smoothly and evenly, like water
out of a pipe, and in abundance; there are far more moving words
in his oratorical dictionary than there are beetles in any restaurant.
He always speaks eloquently and at great length, so much so that
on some occasions, particularly at merchants' weddings, they have
to resort to assistance from the police to stop him.

"I have come for you, old man!" began Poplavsky, finding him at