herbs for his digestion, set off for the town where the circuit
court was being held.

The trial lasted for ten days. Throughout the trial Avdeyev sat
among his companions in misfortune with the stolid composure and
dignity befitting a respectable and innocent man who is suffering
for no fault of his own: he listened and did not understand a word.
He was in an antagonistic mood. He was angry at being detained so
long in the court, at being unable to get Lenten food anywhere, at
his defending counsel's not understanding him, and, as he thought,
saying the wrong thing. He thought that the judges did not understand
their business. They took scarcely any notice of Avdeyev, they only
addressed him once in three days, and the questions they put to him
were of such a character that Avdeyev raised a laugh in the audience
each time he answered them. When he tried to speak of the expenses
he had incurred, of his losses, and of his meaning to claim his
costs from the court, his counsel turned round and made an
incomprehensible grimace, the public laughed, and the judge announced
sternly that that had nothing to do with the case. The last words
that he was allowed to say were not what his counsel had instructed
him to say, but something quite different, which raised a laugh
again.

During the terrible hour when the jury were consulting in their
room he sat angrily in the refreshment bar, not thinking about the
jury at all. He did not understand why they were so long deliberating
when everything was so clear, and what they wanted of him.

Getting hungry, he asked the waiter to give him some cheap Lenten
dish. For forty kopecks they gave him some cold fish and carrots.
He ate it and felt at once as though the fish were heaving in a
chilly lump in his stomach; it was followed by flatulence, heartburn,
and pain.

Afterwards, as he listened to the foreman of the jury reading out
the questions point by point, there was a regular revolution taking
place in his inside, his whole body was bathed in a cold sweat, his
left leg was numb; he did not follow, understood nothing, and
suffered unbearably at not being able to sit or lie down while the
foreman was reading. At last, when he and his companions were allowed
to sit down, the public prosecutor got up and said something
unintelligible, and all at once, as though they had sprung out of
the earth, some police officers appeared on the scene with drawn
swords and surrounded all the pri