impressiveness, sometimes changed the accepted accentuation of words.) 'My son, Ivan, for instance,' he went on; 'the fool's only just twenty--and all at once he comes to me and says: "Let me be married, father." I told him he was a fool; told him he must go into the service first.... Well, there was despair--tears... but with me... no nonsense.' (The words 'no nonsense' the great man seemed to enunciate more with his stomach than his lips; he paused and glanced majestically at his neighbour, the general, while he raised his eyebrows higher than any one could have expected. The civilian general nodded agreeably a little on one side, and with extraordinary rapidity winked with the eye turned to the great man.) 'And what do you think?' the great man began again: 'now he writes to me himself, and thanks me for looking after him when he was a fool.... So that's the way to act.' All the guests, of course, were in complete agreement with the speaker, and seemed quite cheered up by the pleasure and instruction they derived from him.... After dinner, the whole party rose and moved into the drawing-room with a great deal of noise--decorous, however; and, as it were, licensed for the occasion.... They sat down to cards. I got through the evening somehow, and charging my coachman to have my carriage ready at five o'clock next morning, I went to my room. But I was destined, in the course of that same day, to make the acquaintance of a remarkable man. In consequence of the great number of guests staying in the house, no one had a bedroom to himself. In the small, greenish, damp room to which I was conducted by Alexandr Mihalitch's butler, there was already another guest, quite undressed. On seeing me, he quickly ducked under the bed-clothes, covered himself up to the nose, turned a little on the soft feather-bed, and lay quiet, keeping a sharp look-out from under the round frill of his cotton night-cap. I went up to the other bed (there were only two in the room), undressed, and lay down in the damp sheets. My neighbour turned over in bed.... I wished him good-night. Half-an-hour went by. In spite of all my efforts, I could not get to sleep: aimless and vague thoughts kept persistently and monotonously dragging one after another on an endless chain, like the buckets of a hydraulic machine. 'You're not asleep, I fancy?' observed my neighbour. 'No, as you see,' I answered. 'And you're not sleepy either, are you?' 'I'm never sleepy.' 'How's that?' 'Oh! I go to sleep--I don't know what for. I lie in bed, and lie in bed, and so get to sleep.' 'Why do you go to bed before you feel sleepy?' 'Why, what would you have me do?' I made no answer to my neighbour's question. 'I wonder,' he went on, after a brief silence, 'how it is there are no fleas here? Where should there be fleas if not here, one wonders?' 'You seem to regret them,' I remarked. 'No, I don't regret them; but I like everything to be consecutive.' 'O-ho!' thought I; 'what words he uses.'