At that very moment enter Petr Iványch Dóbchinsky and Petr Iványch Bóbchinsky. Everyone knows them, you know them very well: they play the part of the town Gazette. They go about the town all day long, and as soon as they have learnt something interesting they both hurry to spread the news, interrupting each other in telling it, and hurrying immediately to some other place to be the first to communicate the news to someone else. They have been at the only inn of the town, and there they saw a very suspicious person: a young man, “who has something, you know, extraordinary about his face.” He is living there for a fortnight, never paying a penny, and does not journey any further. “What is his object in staying so long in town like ours?” And then, when they were taking their lunch he passed them by and looked so inquisitively in their plates--who may he be? Evidently, the Governor and all present conclude, he must be the Inspector-General who stays there incognito.... A general confusion results from the suspicion. The Governor starts immediately for the inn, to make the necessary enquiries. The womenfolk are in a tremendous excitement. The stranger is simply a young man who is travelling to rejoin his father. On some post-station he met with a certain captain--a great master at cards--and lost all he had in his pocket. Now he cannot proceed any farther, and he cannot pay the landlord, who refuses to credit him with any more meals. The young man feels awfully hungry--no wonder he looked so inquisitively into the plates of the two gentlemen--and resorts to all sorts of tricks to induce the landlord to send him something for his dinner. Just as he is finishing some fossil-like cutlet enters the Gorodníchiy; and a most comic scene follows, the young man thinking that the Governor came to arrest him, and the Governor thinking that he is speaking to the Inspector-General who is trying to conceal his identity. The Governor offers to remove the young man to some more comfortable place. “No, thank you, I have no intent to go to a jail,” sharply retorts the young man.... But it is to his own house that the Governor takes the supposed Inspector, and now an easy life begins for the adventurer. All the functionaries appear in turn to introduce themselves, and everyone is only too happy to give him a bribe of a hundred roubles or so. The merchants come to ask his protection from the Governor; the widow who was flogged comes to lodge a complaint.... In the meantime the young man enters into a flirtation with both the wife and the daughter of the Governor; and, finally, being caught at a very pathetic moment when he is kneeling at the feet of the daughter, without further thought he makes a proposition of marriage. But, having gone so far, the young man, well-provided now with money, hastens to leave the town on the pretext of going to see an uncle; he will be back in a couple of days....