someone who he really was. First of all, then, the officials addressed themselves to Mrs. Korobotchka, but from her they learned little: he had bought some serfs of her for fifteen roubles, she said, and he had said that he dealt in chickens’ feathers, too, and he had promised to purchase all sorts of things; and he had said he furnished tallow to the treasury, and therefore must be a rascal, for there had been one man already who bought chickens’ feathers, and supplied the treasury with tallow, and he had deceived everybody, and had cheated the protopopess out of more than a hundred roubles. All that she said further was nearly a repetition of the same thing, and all that the officials perceived was that Mrs. Korobotchka was simply a stupid old woman. Maniloff replied to them that he was always ready to answer for Pavel Ivanovitch as for himself; that he would willingly sacrifice the whole of his property if he could thereby acquire the hundredth part of Pavel Ivanovitch’s qualities. Altogether he expressed himself in the most flattering terms with regard to the latter, adding some reflections on friendship, which he uttered with half-closed eyes. These thoughts sufficiently exhibited, of course, the tender impulses of his heart, but they did not explain the matter in hand to the officials.

Sobakevitch, on his side, answered that, in his opinion, Tchitchikoff was a fine man; that he had sold the latter serfs for export, and that the people were alive in every sense, but that he would not answer for what might happen in the future; that if they were to die on the road, in consequence of the hardships of transportation, that would be no fault of his, and that God alone is powerful in that matter; but there are many fevers and other deadly diseases in the world, and cases had been heard of where whole villages had died off. The officials had recourse to yet another device, which is not quite honourable, but which is occasionally resorted to—that is to say, they undertook to interrogate Tchitchikoff’s servants through their own lackeys, to find out whether the former knew any particulars with regard to the life and circumstances of their master; however on this side they learned nothing. All they elicited from Petrushka was a bad smell, and from Selifan that his master had “been in the service of the state in the excise department,” and nothing more. A very strange custom obtains with the lower class of people in Russia: if they are questioned directly about anything, they never remember, they retain nothing whatever in their minds, and answer simply that they do not know; but if they are interrogated about something else, they drag this in, and narrate it with a multitude of details which one does not care to listen to. All the researches carried out by the officials merely disclosed to them the fact that they knew nothing with certainty as to what Tchitchikoff was, but that nevertheless Tchitchikoff must surely be something. They eventually concluded to talk the matter over thoroughly, and to arrive at a decision as to what was to be done about it: what measures were to be taken, what our hero really was—whether he was a man whom it was necessary to detain and lay hands upon as being an evil-disposed person, or whether he was a man who could detain and lay hands upon them all as persons of evil intent. With this object, it was proposed that they should all assemble at the house of the chief of police, who is already known to the reader as the father and benefactor of the town.