uproar. The host, a thin, pale
man in an apron and a shabby embroidered cap, had suddenly appeared from
the depths of the taproom, accompanied by his wife, a monstrous, red-faced
creature clothed in a grey flannel frock. The porter whom Dumnoff had
felled, and who was not altogether stunned, was kicking violently in the
attempt to gain his feet among the fallen chairs, a dozen people had come
in from the street at the noise of the fight and stood near the door,
phlegmatically watching the proceedings, and the poor old woman from the
country, who had been supping in the corner, had got her basket on her
knees, holding its handle tightly in one hand and with the other grasping
her half-finished glass of beer, in terror lest some accident should cause
the precious liquid to be spilled, but not calm enough to put it in a
place of safety by the simple process of swallowing.

"They are foreigners," remarked some one in the crowd at the door.

"They are probably Bohemian journeymen," said a tinman who stood in front
of the others. "It serves them right for interfering with an honest
porter." The Bohemian journeymen are detested in Munich on account of
their willingness to work for low prices, which perhaps accounted for the
tinman's readiness to consider the strangers as worsted in the contest.

"We Germans fear God, and nothing else in the world," observed a
mealy-faced shoemaker, quoting Prince Bismarck's famous speech.

The man who had wrestled with the Count seemed to have resigned himself to
the course of awaiting the police, and leaned back against the table
behind him, with folded arms, glaring at the Cossack, while the Count was
vainly attempting to recover possession of the pin which had fastened his
collar, and which he evidently suspected of having slipped down his back,
with the total depravity peculiar to all inanimate things when they are
most needed. But the second porter, having broken the chair, upset a table
covered with unused saucers for beer glasses, and otherwise materially
contributing to swell the din and increase the already considerable havoc,
had regained his feet and lost no time in making for Dumnoff. The Russian,
enchanted at the prospect of a renewal of hostilities so unfortunately
interrupted, met the newcomer half-way, and, each embracing the other with
cheerful alacrity, the two heavy men began to stamp and turn round and
round with each other like a couple of particularly awkward bears
atte