rose from all sides. Her master bowed,
and when all was still again, went on playing. . . . Just as he
took one very high note, someone high up among the audience uttered
a loud exclamation:

"Auntie!" cried a child's voice, "why it's Kashtanka!"

"Kashtanka it is!" declared a cracked drunken tenor. "Kashtanka!
Strike me dead, Fedyushka, it is Kashtanka. Kashtanka! here!"

Someone in the gallery gave a whistle, and two voices, one a boy's
and one a man's, called loudly: "Kashtanka! Kashtanka!"

Auntie started, and looked where the shouting came from. Two faces,
one hairy, drunken and grinning, the other chubby, rosy-cheeked and
frightened-looking, dazed her eyes as the bright light had dazed
them before. . . . She remembered, fell off the chair, struggled
on the sand, then jumped up, and with a delighted yap dashed towards
those faces. There was a deafening roar, interspersed with whistles
and a shrill childish shout: "Kashtanka! Kashtanka!"

Auntie leaped over the barrier, then across someone's shoulders.
She found herself in a box: to get into the next tier she had to
leap over a high wall. Auntie jumped, but did not jump high enough,
and slipped back down the wall. Then she was passed from hand to
hand, licked hands and faces, kept mounting higher and higher, and
at last got into the gallery. . . .

----

Half an hour afterwards, Kashtanka was in the street, following the
people who smelt of glue and varnish. Luka Alexandritch staggered
and instinctively, taught by experience, tried to keep as far from
the gutter as possible.

"In sin my mother bore me," he muttered. "And you, Kashtanka, are
a thing of little understanding. Beside a man, you are like a joiner
beside a cabinetmaker."

Fedyushka walked beside him, wearing his father's cap. Kashtanka
looked at their backs, and it seemed to her that she had been
following them for ages, and was glad that there had not been a
break for a minute in her life.

She remembered the little room with dirty wall-paper, the gander,
Fyodor Timofeyitch, the delicious dinners, the lessons, the circus,
but all that seemed to her now like a long, tangled, oppressive
dream.

A CHAMELEON

THE police superintendent Otchumyelov is walking across the market
square wearing a new overcoat and carrying a parcel under his arm.
A red-haired policeman strides after him with a sieve full of
confiscated gooseberries in his hands. There is silence all