is axe, and stood gaping.

"And from the cave a deep bass voice replied: 'Elesi-a-ah!' while at
the same moment the tench sprang from the cave, and, champing its jaws,
wriggled and wriggled back to the slough."

Here an old soldier named Saniavin, a morose man, a tippler, and a
sufferer from asthma and an inexplicable grudge against life in
general, croaked out:

"How could your tench have wriggled across dry land if it was a fish?"

"Can, for that matter, a fish speak?" was Ossip's good-humoured retort.

All of which inspired Mokei Budirin, a grey-headed muzhik of a cast of
countenance canine in the prominence of his jaws and the recession of
his forehead, and taciturn withal, though not otherwise remarkable, to
give slow, nasal utterance to his favourite formula.

"That is true enough," he said.

For never could anything be spoken of that was grim or marvellous or
lewd or malicious, but Budirin at once re-echoed softly, but in a tone
of unshakable conviction: "That is true enough."

Thereafter he would tap me on the breast with his hard and ponderous
fist.

Presently work again underwent an interruption through the fact that
Yakov Boev, a man who possessed both a stammer and a squint, became
similarly filled with a desire to tell us something about a fish. Yet
from the moment that he began his narrative everyone declined to
believe it, and laughed at his broken verbiage as, frequently invoking
the Deity, and cursing, and brandishing his awl, and viciously
swallowing spittle, he shouted amid general ridicule:

"Once-once upon a time there lived a man. Yes, other folk before YOU
have believed my tale. Indeed, it is no more than the truth that I'm
going to tell you. Very well! Cackle away, and be damned!"

Here everyone without exception dropped his work to shout with
merriment and clap his hands: with the result that, doffing his cap,
and thereby disclosing a silvered, symmetrically shaped head with one
bald spot amid its one dark portion, Ossip was forced to shout severely:

"Hi, you Budirin! You've had your say, and given us some fun, and there
must be no more of it."

"But I had only just begun what I want to say," the old soldier
grumbled, spitting upon the palms of his hands.

Next, Ossip turned to myself.

"Inspector," he began...

It is my opinion that in thus hindering the men from work through his
tale-telling, Ossip had some definite end in view. I could not say
precisely what that end was,