"Well, what is it?" snapped Clement the Clerk, horribly angry. "Why don't you speak?" The Wallach raised his round eyebrows, which looked, for all the world, like a charcoal smear extending from his nostrils to his temples, and which also served him as a kind of propeller for shoving backwards and forwards the lamb's-wool cap that he wore half over his face, looked at the poet with wide-open eyes, and asked him-- "Are you he whom they pay to tell lies?" The Wallach meant no offence by this terminology. It was only his roundabout way of describing Clement the Clerk's sphere of activity. The poet was almost choking with rage. "And whose ox are you?" he exclaimed furiously. "The ox of his Excellency who sent this letter," he answered with perfect simplicity. "What is your master's name?" cried Clement, angrily snatching the letter out of the Wallach's hand. "They call him Excellency." Clement tore open the letter and read as follows--"I want a word or two with you; follow the bearer whithersoever he leads you." Clement was wroth enough already, but the reflection that he was summoned away on important business, and had no boots to go in, was the last straw. He was quite beside himself. "Go," cried he to the Wallach, "and tell your master, whoever he may be, that he is as near to me as I am to him; if he wants to speak to me, let him take the trouble to come hither. Do you understand?" "I understand, Dumni Macska" (Mister Pussy), returned the Wallach, involuntarily using in his fright the nickname secretly given by the Roumanian peasants to the Patrol-officer when he is making his rounds; and with that he slouched out of the room. Meanwhile Clement, with a great muscular effort, had climbed on to his high-backed chair again, and placed two huge folios upright on the floor in front of him, so that his coming visitor might not see that he was bare-footed. In a short time strident, energetic footsteps were audible outside, and Clement the Clerk, peeping out of the window, perceived to his no small confusion that his visitor was none other than his Excellency, Count Ladislaus Csaky, accompanied by two gold-laced heydukes. "Clement," thought the clerk to himself, "now's the time to assert your dignity! No doubt his lordship is a great man and a high; but, on the other hand, he is in the Prince's bad books, while you, my boy, are in high favour at court, and a public officer to boot." So he hid his feet behind his books, stuck his pen between his lips, and when Csaky came in did not so much as offer him a seat. Csaky seemed much put out by this reception. "You have a very high opinion of your official dignity," said he to Clement. "I am what I am thanks to the favour of the Prince," returned Clement haughtily, crossing his arms with an air of importance.