Before an _important personage_ of this type appeared our Akaki Akakievich, and at a most inopportune moment--that is to say, for himself, but opportune for the _important personage_. The _important personage_ was in his cabinet, conversing very cheerfully with an old acquaintance and friend of his youth, whom he had not seen for many years. It was at such a time that they told him of a certain Bashmachkin who wished to see him. He asked abruptly, “Who is he?” They answered him, “Some sort of official.” “Ah, let him wait, now is not the time,” said the _important personage_. It is necessary to mention here that the _important personage_ simply lied: he had the time to spare; he had already talked over everything with his friend, and the conversation had begun some time ago to lag with long silences; and they merely continued to tap each other on the leg, and exclaim, “That’s how it is, Ivan Abramovich!” “That’s so, Stephen Varlamovich!” Nevertheless, he caused the official to wait, in order to show his friend, a man some time out of the service and living in a village, how long he compelled officials to wait for him in the anteroom. Finally, having conversed to his heart’s content, and having had also his fill of silence and smoked a cigar in a very comfortable chair with an easy back, he bethought himself all of a sudden, as it were, and said to the secretary who stood at the door with papers needing his signature, “Oh, yes, I believe an official is waiting to see me; tell him to come in.” On seeing Akaki Akakievich’s humble aspect and his shabby uniform, he suddenly turned to him and said, “What is it you wish?” He put this question abruptly and in a hard voice, which he had practised in his own room, when alone, and before the mirror, a full week before receiving his present position and rank. Akaki Akakievich, who already felt a certain timorousness, became somewhat confused, and, so far as his power of speech would permit, explained, with an even more frequent employment than usual of the word “that,” that his cloak was quite new, and had been stolen in a most inhuman manner, and that he was now applying to him to use his influence with the chief of police or some one else to find his cloak. The general, for some reason or other, regarded such conduct as familiar. “What, dear sir,” said he in his abrupt manner, “are you ignorant of the rules? Why do you come to me? Do you not know how such matters are managed? You should have first presented a petition to the office; it would have then gone to the chief clerk, then to the clerk of the division, then to the secretary, and the secretary would have reported it to me----” “But, Your Excellency,” said Akaki Akakievich, gathering together his final remnant of courage, and breaking out into a terrible perspiration, “I, Your Excellency, have presumed to trouble you because, you see, the secretaries are that--an untrustworthy race----”