t was certainly the liveliest thing I have ever seen in my life. But
the horses were the most joyous, and danced as if a torch was held under
their nostrils, and all of them, my word! were ready to throw their
riders because the men were not of the same mind with them as to the
route to follow! From our window we laughed fit to kill at such a
mixture of sprawling boots and dancing hoofs. But the troopers finally
got all their horses to barracks, with patience, for the Emperor's
cavalry are the best riders in the world, Feodor Feodorovitch. And we
certainly had a great laugh!--Your health, Matrena Petrovna."

[* The "Barque" is a restaurant on a boat, among the isles,
near the Gulf of Finland, on a bank of the Neva.]

These last graceful words were addressed to Madame Trebassof, who
shrugged her shoulders at the undesired gallantry of the gay Councilor.
She did not join in the conversation, excepting to calm the general, who
wished to send the whole regiment to the guard-house, men and horses.
And while the roisterers laughed over the adventure she said to her
husband in the advisory voice of the helpful wife:

"Feodor, you must not attach importance to what that old fool Ivan
tells you. He is the most imaginative man in the capital when he has had
champagne."

"Ivan, you certainly have not had horses served with champagne in
pails," the old boaster, Athanase Georgevitch, protested jealously. He
was an advocate, well-known for his table-feats, who claimed the hardest
drinking reputation of any man in the capital, and he regretted not to
have invented that tale.

"On my word! And the best brands! I had won four thousand roubles. I
left the little fete with fifteen kopecks."

Matrena Petrovna was listening to Ermolai, the faithful country servant
who wore always, even here in the city, his habit of fresh nankeen, his
black leather belt, his large blue pantaloons and his boots glistening
like ice, his country costume in his master's city home. Madame Matrena
rose, after lightly stroking the hair of her step-daughter Natacha,
whose eyes followed her to the door, indifferent apparently to the
tender manifestations of her father's orderly, the soldier-poet, Boris
Mourazoff, who had written beautiful verses on the death of the
Moscow students, after having shot them, in the way of duty, on their
barricades.

Ermolai conducted his mistress to the drawing-room and pointed across
to a door that he had left open,