Gregor brought his shoulders to a level with the top of his small, flat, lobeless ears. “You make me sweat!” he said, with ineffable contempt. “You’d be satisfied with anything, as long as you can burn your foolish throats with strong alcohol. Why, I tell you”--and here he beat one dirty fist into a grimier palm, the better to emphasize his point--“the government is getting millions out of you, jackasses that you are; and what do you get in return? Why, stuff not fit to wash horses’ feet with. Cheap! No! A thousand times no, not at the price your guts pay for it. Then, also, it stupefies your brains that, by G--, don’t need it! And that’s just what the government wants--to make you more imbecile than you already are. When you had to sell your harvests before they were out of the ground, in order to buy enough to get drunk as often as you could, sometimes you stopped to think. Now, with your nasty little cheap bottlefuls of ‘destroyer’ that you stow in all your pockets, and guzzle from morning till night, it’s much worse. You’re never sober. Oh, you can look at me! I don’t care. I’m speaking the truth. And who have you to thank for all this? Why, your ‘good _Barines_,’ of course, your high lords who make the laws and keep you idiots under their thumbs. Government monopoly! Yah! Perhaps you were thinking that was all arranged for your benefit. But you are sheep, nothing else but sheep, grazing where you chance to be put, whether the grass is long or short, dry or juicy, never once dreaming of seeking new pastures to fill your bellies full.” He paused, expelled a generous cloud of smoke from his well-trained lungs, and glanced triumphantly about him. The listeners were becoming interested, as was testified by varied and guttural grunts. The _staròstá_ alone did not seem to relish the joke. “You might talk more politely of my _vòdka_, you there!” he commented, raising his ponderous bulk from the bench near the stove. “I don’t get it for nothing, if I do sell it cheap! The government doesn’t make me a present of it, does it?” The man opened his displeasing mouth wide, and laughed from the tonsils forward, his small, red-rimmed eyes disappearing almost completely in his bilious, moon-shaped face.